Festival of Punishment 
Thomas Laqueur
- Proximity to Death by William McFeely
- Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment edited by Bonnie Bobit
For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. Sometimes ahead of the curve: Michigan abolished capital punishment in 1846, well before most of Europe; Rhode Island and Wisconsin got rid of it in 1853; North Dakota has never had it; sometimes a bit behind: seven out of nine states that had abandoned it embraced it again in the decades after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution; sometimes – as in its tacit acceptance of lynching and of the quasi-judicial hangings which gave mob murder a veneer of legitimacy – horribly out of step. But basically part of the pack and notably so in the shadow of the Holocaust.
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Thomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes about and teaches European cultural history.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Old Country · the troublesome marriage of Poles and Jews
Lectures about Heaven · Forgiving Germany
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