Executing Freedom : The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States / / Daniel LaChance

• Autore: LaChance Daniel
• Pubblicazione: Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (275 pages)
• Disciplina: 364.660973
• Soggetto topico: Capital punishment - United States
• Soggetto non controllato: American political culture; capital punishment; death penalty; distrust of government; executions; freedom; libertarianism; rehabilitation; retribution; vigilantism
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. When Bundy Buckles Up -- Chapter 1. "Inside Your Daddy's House": Capital Punishment and Creeping Nihilism in the Atomic Age -- Chapter 2. "The Respect Which Is Due Them as Men": The Rise of Retribution in a Polarizing Nation -- Chapter 3. Fixed Risks and Free Souls: Judging and Executing Capital Defendants after Gregg v. Georgia -- Chapter 4. Shock Therapy: The Rehabilitation of Capital Punishment -- Chapter 5. "A Country Worthy of Heroes": The Old West and the New American Death Penalty -- Chapter 6. Father Knows Best: Capital Punishment as a Family Value -- Epilogue. Disabling Freedom -- Notes -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn't trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do-and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
• Titolo autorizzato: Executing Freedom
• ISBN: 0-226-06672-X
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910136124803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II