Botched Executions and the Struggle to End Capital Punishment: A Twentieth‐Century Story

Why have accounts of botched executions not played a larger role in the struggle to end capital punishment in the United States? In the twentieth century, when methods of execution became increasingly controlled and sterilized, botched executions would seem to have had real abolitionist potential. This article examines newspaper coverage of botched executions to determine and describe the way they were presented to the public and why they have contributed little to the abolitionist cause. Although botched executions reveal pain, violence, and inhumanity associated with state killing, newspaper coverage of these events neutralizes the impact of that revelation. Throughout the last century, newspapers presented botched executions as misfortunes rather than injustices. We identify three distinct modes by which newspaper coverage neutralized the impact of botched executions and presented them as misfortunes rather than as systemic injustices: (1) the dual narratives of sensationalism and recuperation in the early years of the twentieth century, (2) the decline of sensationalism and the rise of “professionalism” in the middle of the century, and (3) the emphasis on “balanced” reporting toward the end of the century.     

Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission,the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title

In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people's rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In keeping with the latter approach, this article seeks to recover the manner in which the indigenous people's interests in land were treated in the British colony of South Australia at the time it was founded in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. It emphasises the manner in which the colonisers, the South Australian Colonisation Commission, rather than the British Colonial Office, deployed a range of legal arguments, especially in the context of political negotiations between these two parties. It concludes that the imperial government's treatment of indigenous interests in land was primarily determined by its perception of the relationships of power on the ground between the colonial state, the settlers and the Aboriginal people rather than by its application of any particular legal principle or norm.     

Wrongfully Convicted: How the Dutch Deal with the Revision of Their “Miscarriages of Justice”

During most of the twentieth century the very existence of judicial errors was considered an awkward subject in the Dutch legal system. This article considers the change of attitude in recent years. In previous years there was a remarkable self-confidence within the criminal justice system (and in most of the scholarly writings) in doing things the ‘right way.’ After a few warnings from (only partly legally trained) scholars, who became interested in the functioning of the system, and moreover, after a few clear and undeniable cases of judicial error, there was a volte-face in the general feeling amongst both the public and the profession. It is the opinion of the authors that this shift in opinion is historically important. This article therefore intends to draw a picture of the current state of affairs in The Netherlands.     

Antinomies and the Automobile: A New Approach to Criminal Justice Histories

In the twentieth century, the antinomy of freedom and coercion served as the dominant paradigm for understanding issues of crime and punishment. Roscoe Pound in Criminal Justice in America (1930) and Herbert Packer in The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968) described a tension between the values of individual liberty and general security to explain the problems with the justice system and the public's disagreements over their solution. Historians of twentieth‐century criminal law have also adopted this framework to explain causation and change. This essay argues that an antinomic perspective of criminal justice history, while useful, has obscured important historical questions. A focus on social changes, such as the transformations that the automobile brought about in the commission of crimes and police practices, instead of on contrasting values, offers a different account of how proceduralism became inextricably tied to notions of American freedom in the twentieth century. This approach also historicizes the “paradigm of antinomies” and shows how people in the past, like Pound and Packer, mobilized dualistic thinking, which shaped a criminal legal culture based on an antagonism—both real and perceived—between citizens and law enforcement.     

To depend on one's children or to depend on oneself: savings for old-age and children's impact on wealth

How did workers make provisions for old age before the introduction of old age pensions? What was the relative importance of dependence on children and saving for old age respectively? This article concerns the transition from a traditional family-based system for economic support in old age to a more modern system. Regarding the nineteenth century, studies have shown that (a) savings generally were insufficient for full retirement, and that (b) families were dependent on children's incomes when the breadwinner became older. Little attention has been paid to the question of how the relative importance of these two alternatives changed during the century. This question is addressed here in a cross-sectional study of net wealth based on probate inventories for three Swedish towns in the 1820s and the 1900s.

The results show that in general the economic importance of children was larger among the lower socio-economic strata. They also reveal that net costs for having children increased between the investigated periods. This means that dependence on children became more expensive. Consequently, the economic importance of this alternative decreased. This may have been a strong motive for the fertility transition.

On the other hand, net wealth for workers increased at the end of the nineteenth century. Financial assets constituted a great part of the increase. Workers with children had less financial savings than those without children, showing that there was a conflict between the traditional and the modern systems for support in old age. However, still at the turn of the twentieth century funds were generally too small to allow an old worker to retire. These results indicate that neither the old, nor the modern systems, fully satisfied the need for support in old age. This may explain why several Western European countries introduced old age pensions at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

The fertility decline in the Dutch province of Limburg, 1880–1960: On understanding historical actors in a constrained environment

The Dutch province of Limburg is mentioned in the European Fertility Project studies because of the fact that its fertility was remarkably high well into the twentieth century and declined only gradually. This article explores the structural background of changes in reproductive behavior in Limburg. The province is economically differentiated in industrial areas and traditional agricultural regions. Also, there is a clear cultural heterogeneity. Using data at the community level, the article analyzes of the economic motivation as well as of the mental acceptation of the introduction of neoMalthusian behavior. The results show that we are better able to explain the variance in behavior as the twentieth century proceeds, and that the factor “economy” appears to be the best predictor, although the effects of a cultural filter become evident.     

U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar and the Construction of Tamil Literary “Tradition”

U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar (1885–1942) is arguably one of the most influential figures of the so-called “Tamil Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his work has profoundly shaped the study of Tamil literature, both in India and the Euro-American academy, for more than a century. Among his many literary works is a long and incomplete autobiographical treatise known as Eṉ Carittiram, literally “My Life Story,” initially published in 122 installments between 1940 and 1942. What little scholarly attention this fascinating autobiographical narrative has received thus far has largely read the text as an artless, transparent documenting of South Indian literary culture in the late nineteenth century. Yet the text reveals substantial rhetorical art on close reading. Greater attention to Cāminātaiyar’s specific context and probable concerns when composing (and publicly publishing) Eṉ Carittiram suggests alternative ways of reading Tamil literary history and those texts that he first made widely available.     

Interracial marriages in twentieth-century Cape Town: evidence from Anglican marriage records

ABSTRACT

One of the most controversial laws promulgated by the National Party as part of South Africa’s mid-twentieth century apartheid policies was the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. This Act stipulated that ‘a marriage between a European and non-European may not be solemnized, and any such marriage solemnized in contravention of the provisions of this section shall be void and of null effect’. We use more than 23,000 newly-transcribed Anglican marriage records of Cape Town for the period 1911 to 1964 to show that the Act had mostly followed, and not led, changing interracial marriage practices. In the years before the Act’s promulgation, interracial marriages were rare and on the decline, despite the fact that apartheid-era policies had not yet been institutionalized. Our results suggests that marriage behaviour in Cape Town, and probably in South Africa more generally, was shaped by racial stratification early in the twentieth century. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, although devastating to those affected, was a correlate to rather than the cause of changing marriage behaviour.     

Stigmatized cohabitation in the Latvian region of the eastern Baltic littoral: nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The social history of coresidence arrangements in the Latvian region suggests that forms of cohabitation without marriage were present in the Latvian population since the eighteenth century when empirical evidence became available. Before the twentieth century, however, these forms remained marginal and seldom involved choice. The subject of severe criticism until the 1960s–1970s, such forms become more widespread thereafter as the Latvian population began to exhibit many key features of a second demographic revolution. Post-Soviet censuses now suggest that such coresidence patterns in the Latvian population approach the levels of those in most western European states, including the Scandinavian countries.     

We were conscious of the sort of people we mixed with

In the Republic of Ireland, the family is both a private entity and a construct of the state, and the relationship between family and state is outlined in the Irish constitution. In the Northern Irish state a similar conviction that the family unit is essential to the welfare of society has been implicit in social policy and legislation, as has the classification of women's place. Access to financial resources has played a significant role in situating the family in society and income and social class were inextricably interwoven.

This paper explores how social attitudes have shaped family behaviour and identity in mid twentieth century Ireland, particularly in terms of the part played by women. Class consciousness and definitions of “respectability” are considered, using oral history testimony from a number of women remembering when they were young in the 1930s and 40s. The interviewees accepted the domestic role assigned to them by popular consensus and social policy. Their stories contain frequent references to their reluctance to associate with people whose occupations were judged to be inferior because of the lower status accorded to certain kinds of work. The paper will consider the extent to which legislators and policy makers shared such class awareness and how that might have influenced the shaping of the family unit in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.     

War,crime, empire and cosmopolitanism

The millions of deaths produced by states and governments make the 20th century ‘unnameable’, a century far more lethal than all previous ‘pre-civil’ epochs. It does not appear that contemporary state violence tends to decline or to temper the brutality commonly attributed to archaic armies, nor that the rules and limitations internationally imposed on that violence, throughout the last decades, have reduced its effects. The 20th century having gone, and while hope was growing that mass murder and destruction would also go with it, recent events appear to suggest that the twenty-first century is poised to become unnameable in its turn. In this paper a reflection is presented of the notion of war as annihilation, which emerges in contemporary international conflicts. This is followed by a review of the debate on the relationship between war, empire and crime. As a logical extension of the argument developed, war is described as a particularly devastating form of crime of the powerful. Finally, reflecting on the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the discussion suggests that such a concept may offer legitimacy to those who invest their enthusiasm in supporting contemporary wars as well as to those who fight against them. The latter may find inspiration in the idea of a ‘critical’ cosmopolitanism.     

Racially Restrictive Covenants—Were They Dignity Takings?

Racially restrictive covenants—subdivision rules or neighborhood agreements that “run with the land” to bar sales of rentals by minority members—were common and legally enforceable in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their demeaning character, these racial covenants took away opportunities from excluded minorities, rather than things, and thus they amounted to something less than the dramatic “dignity takings” that Bernadette Atuahene (2014) describes in her new book on dignity takings in South Africa. In this article, I explore some significant ways in which racially restrictive covenants differed from dignity takings as Atuahene defines them, as well as the shadowy similarities between racial covenants and Atuahene's dignity takings; I focus here on the dimensions of dehumanization, state involvement, and property takings. I conclude with a discussion of remedies, particularly considering measures that restore dignity through both public policies and private actions.     

Women in a changing economy: the misleading tale of participation rates in a historical perspective

In this article I focus on women's advancement in the Swedish labour market during more than a century. By applying a long-term perspective I give the historical background to what is commonly seen as a success story. By reassessing census and labour force survey data I show that participation rates may tell a misleading tale not only for the past but also for the present. In a long-term perspective, Sweden does not stand out as a country with high female labour force participation rates. It was not until the mid-1960s that market work came to play a larger part of women's life, since young women worked until they had children and older married women returned to the labour force after having raised a family. During the late 1960s and the 1970s, women with children under the age of seven became an integrated part of the labour force. It seemed as if welfare reforms supported women's market work in an unprecedented way; gender differences in labour force participation decreased and became very small. A reassessment of labour force participation rates together with alternative measures of market work such as at-work and market-hours rates show that similarly to how they underestimate women's market work and contributions to production during the early decades of the twentieth century, they overestimate women's market work at the end of the century, neglecting the extent to which reproductive responsibilities still interfere with women's paid work through absence and part-time work.     

Women's agency in Australia's first fertility transition: a debate revisited

The place of women's agency in the fertility transition of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is a contested one. Some argue that the transition was achieved mainly through male methods of contraception. Others, including many arguing from an Australian perspective, contend that women's agency in fertility decline was significant. In this article, the authors revisit the issue of women's agency in Australia. Drawing on a range of archival sources and scholarship, they seek to demonstrate that women in Australia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had access to contraception, albeit limited, and, where that failed, to abortion. The authors argue that the changing political and educational climate, which saw women gaining the vote in 1894 in South Australia and admission to secondary and higher education and paid work, provided the setting for women's changing status. Their increasing agency – an agency many women worked to secure – encouraged women to challenge many traditional practices.     

Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders,Massive Resistance,and the Supreme Court, 1954–1958

Exploiting a range of archival materials, we argue that state‐level variation in judicial backlash to Brown was as much the result of strategic choices by southern political elites as it was the ingrained prejudices of the region's white voters. Presenting case studies of massive resistance in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arkansas, we show that elite agency profoundly shaped the patchwork development of grassroots resistance to integration across the South. These findings challenge the prevailing view that backlash to Brown signaled the unequivocal triumph of racial conservatives. Rather, we argue that the region's response offered individual members of the southern elite significant autonomy to direct massive resistance in their home states. We also argue that southern lawmakers were responsible for the South's embrace of popular constitutionalism post‐Brown, and thus that it may not have been “popular” at all. We conclude that studies of judicial backlash would do well to reevaluate the assumption that backlash is necessarily a grassroots phenomenon.     

Shining Some Light Back on the Dark Ages: New York State's Early Environmental Law and Its Implications for Today's Environmental Insurance Coverage Disputes

While many environmental practitioners consider the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in the 1970s and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in the 1980s as the dawn of modern environmental law, New York State has a robust body of antipollution law that predates those federal statutes by decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York State statutes, embracing well-established common law principles, contained limitations on the disposal of harmful industrial waste into the waters of the state. The New York State Public Health Law required permits for certain discharges of industrial waste, and the common law provided injunctions and monetary damages for those injured by environmental pollution. This body of law should not be overlooked during coverage disputes over historical environmental contamination because it documents an awareness by the state legislature of the impact of pollution on both surface and groundwaters of the state, and because it demonstrates that harmful unpermitted discharges were prohibited by law since the beginning of the twentieth century.     

The fertility decline in the Dutch province of Limburg, 1880–1960: On understanding historical actors in a constrained environment

The Dutch province of Limburg is mentioned in the European Fertility Project studies because of the fact that its fertility was remarkably high well into the twentieth century and declined only gradually. This article explores the structural background of changes in reproductive behavior in Limburg. The province is economically differentiated in industrial areas and traditional agricultural regions. Also, there is a clear cultural heterogeneity. Using data at the community level, the article analyzes of the economic motivation as well as of the mental acceptation of the introduction of neoMalthusian behavior. The results show that we are better able to explain the variance in behavior as the twentieth century proceeds, and that the factor “economy” appears to be the best predictor, although the effects of a cultural filter become evident.     

Crime on the High Seas: Crimes of Globalization and the Sinking of the Senegalese Ferry Le Joola

The world’s second largest maritime disaster occurred on September 26th 2002, the sinking of the Senegal’s state run ferry Le Joola, killing 1863 passengers. In the wake of the sinking, it became clear that the state of Senegal held liability for the ferry’s failure; the government readily admitted its errors and several ministers either stepped down or were removed from their positions. In many ways, this case, at least on the surface, looks like a classic example of a state crime – illegal activities carried out by the state or state agencies. However, despite unequivocal governmental responsibility, we suggest that this was not simply a case of state crime. Rather, a thorough investigation and analysis of the reasons and forces behind the Le Joola sinking suggest that international institutions, primarily the World Bank, bear culpability for the disaster due to the way in which their policies and economic development demands altered Senegal’s social, economic and political structures. In conclusion, we offer a criminological analysis of the catalysts leading to the reinstatement of the state run ferry to the coastal waters and the subsequent actions taken by the State of Senegal and of International Society.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Nashville, TN. November 17–20, 2004.     

Law by human intent or evolution? Some remarks on the Austrian school of economics’ role in the development of law and economics

In the late nineteenth century, economic analysis of law experienced an outright rejection by the German-speaking legal community. In the second half of the twentieth century, it became a dominant approach in American legal inquiry. We argue that this success was partly due to the insights of Austrian economics which the second wave of law and economics has incorporated. We argue that Austrian legal and economic scholars marked the two cornerstones between which the subsequent discussion oscillated: social planning versus evolution (spontaneous order).