The Abolition Classics

The Modern Era - Wilde, Dunbar, Darrow, Alomar and Dreiser, 1889-1925

von Jeff Hood

574 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Locked out of the statehouse, the argument went looking for a reader. Four novels, a poem written in a prison cell, the first English translation of a Catalan address, and the study that went looking for deterrence in the returns and came back empty.After the Civil War, the American abolition movement lost the floor it had spent thirty years winning. The scaffold went behind the wall, and the lynching tree went up in its place. So the argument went where arguments go when the statehouse closes.Adeline Sergeant writes what a capital conviction does to everyone standing around the condemned man. Oscar Wilde, prisoner C.3.3, watches a trooper hang at Reading Gaol and writes the only poem in the language that has changed anybody's mind about the gallows - reset here at the Cummins Unit in Grady, Arkansas, in the era of the needle. Paul Laurence Dunbar writes a family destroyed by an accusation a white household finds convenient. Clarence Darrow puts you in the cell with a man who killed his wife and cannot explain it any better than that.Gabriel Alomar, in Barcelona in 1912, says the thing the whole series has been circling: the scaffold is not law, it is worship, and the executioner is a priest. His address appears here in English for the first time. Raymond Bye goes looking for deterrence in the census returns and cannot find it - and notices, in 1919, that the states that execute most are the states that lynch most. And Theodore Dreiser turns a drowning in the Adirondacks into the argument that the killing is the last thing the machine does, not the first.By 1925, the case for abolition has gone mainstream.

• Reihe: The Abolition Classics - Collected Editions
• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Gesellschaft und Kultur, allgemein Soziale und ethische Themen Ethische Fragen, Themen und Debatten Todesstrafe
• ISBN: 9798235105751
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 28.08.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Complicit Press