PILLARS OF SALT, MONUMENTS OF GRACE: NEW ENGLAND CRIME LITERATURE AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, 1674- 1860

• NCJ Number: 147187
• Author(s): D A Cohen
• Date Published: 1993
• Length: 362 pages
• Sale Source: Oxford University Press, Inc
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This book examines the major types of crime literature that appeared in New England between 1674 and 1860, including conversion narratives, execution accounts, trial reports and newspaper coverage, broadside poems, and dying speeches.

Abstract

The first section discusses themes of warning and salvation in execution sermons and conversion narratives, focusing on the period between 1674 and 1738. The next section describes evolving explanations of crime and justifications of capital punishment found in execution sermons of the late 17th through the early 19th Centuries. Criminal autobiographies, ranging from last-speech broadsides to full-length memoirs, written in the mid- to late 18th Century are examined. The book concludes with a section investigating the various crime genres, especially trial reports and romantic biographies, and newspaper stories dealing with sexual violence that appeared in the first half of the 19th Century. This analysis demonstrates a cultural shift in New England, away from Puritanism and Calvinistic notions of sin, to a society where lawyers, journalists, and fiction writers defined moral values.