The Thackeray Edition proudly announces two additions to its collection: Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The Thackeray Edition is the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process.
Written in 1839-40 for Fraser's Magazine, Catherine was Thackeray's first novel. Although originally intended as a spoof of the 1830s Newgate school of criminal romance, it has intrinsic merit of its own for its cynical narrator and roguish heroine, both of whom harbinger similar creations in Vanity Fair eight years later.
Sheldon F. Goldfarb is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.
Edgar F. Harden is Professor of English, Simon Fraser University.
Peter L. Shillingsburg is Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, Lamar University.
In The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado, noted death penalty scholar Michael Radelet chronicles the details of each capital punishment trial and execution that has taken place in Colorado since 1859. The book describes the debates and struggles that Coloradans have had over the use of the death penalty, placing the cases of the 103 men whose sentences were carried out and 100 more who were never executed into the context of a gradual worldwide trend away from this form of punishment.
For more than 150 years, Coloradans have been deeply divided about the death penalty, with regular questions about whether it should be expanded, restricted, or eliminated. It has twice been abolished, but both times state lawmakers reinstated the contentious punitive measure. Prison administrators have contributed to this debate, with some refusing to participate in executions and some lending their voices to abolition efforts. Colorado has also had a rich history of experimenting with execution methods, first hanging prisoners in public and then, starting in 1890, using the "twitch-up gallows" for four decades. In 1933, Colorado began using a gas chamber and eventually moved to lethal injection in the 1990s.
Based on meticulous archival research in official state archives, library records, and multimedia sources, The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado, will inform the conversation on both sides of the issue anywhere the future of the death penalty is under debate.
Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings.
Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In contrast, in Shelby County, which included the growing city of Memphis, more men were legally executed than lynched. Marion County, Florida, demonstrated a firmly entrenched tradition of lynching for sexual assault that ended in the early 1930s with three legal death sentences in quick succession.
With a critical eye to issues of location, circumstance, history, and race, Vandiver considers the ways that legal and extralegal processes imitated, influenced, and differed from each other. A series of case studies demonstrates a parallel between mock trials that were held by lynch mobs and legal trials that were rushed through the courts and followed by quick executions.
Tying her research to contemporary debates over the death penalty, Vandiver argues that modern death sentences, like lynchings of the past, continue to be influenced by factors of race and place, and sentencing is comparably erratic.
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