Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. Thi

On August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before a crowd of 20,000. The public outrage which followed resulted in the complete abolit

Hiding the Guillotine examines the question of state involvement in violence by tracing the evolution of public executions in France. Why did the state move exe

This book provides a comprehensive overview of capital punishment in the Australian colonies for the very first time. The author illuminates all aspects of the

A history of public executions in France from the medieval spectacle of suffering to the invention of the Revolutionary guillotine, up to the last public execut