Michael Ayers Trotti's Books

The Body in the Reservoir

Murder and Sensationalism in the South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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The Body in the Reservoir

Murder and Sensationalism in the South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

Centered on a series of dramatic murders in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Richmond, Virginia, The Body in the Reservoir uses these gripping stories of crime to explore the evolution of sensationalism in southern culture. In Richmond, as across the nation, the embrace of modernity was accompanied by the prodigious growth of mass culture and its accelerating interest in lurid stories of crime and bloodshed. But while others have emphasized the importance of the penny press and yellow journalism on the shifting nature of the media and cultural responses to violence, Michael Trotti reveals a more gradual and nuanced story of change. In addition, Richmond's racial makeup (one-third to one-half of the population was African American) allows Trotti to challenge assumptions about how black and white media reported the sensational; the surprising discrepancies offer insight into just how differently these two communities experienced American justice. An engaging look at the connections between culture and violence, this book gets to the heart--or perhaps the shadowy underbelly--of the sensational as the South became modern.

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Page Count

314

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807899038

ISBN 13

9780807899038

The Body in the Reservoir

Murder and Sensationalism in the South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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The Body in the Reservoir

Murder and Sensationalism in the South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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Page Count

314

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807899038

ISBN 13

9780807899038

The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

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Page Count

267

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1469670429

ISBN 13

9781469670423

The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

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. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

University of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1469670410

ISBN 13

9781469670416

Book's by Michael Ayers Trotti

The Body in the Reservoir

The Body in the Reservoir

The Body in the Reservoir

The Body in the Reservoir

The End of Public Execution

The End of Public Execution

The End of Public Execution

The End of Public Execution

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