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"Meranze, Michael"
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Laboratories of Virtue
Michael Meranze uses Philadelphia as a case study to analyze the relationship between penal reform and liberalism in early America. In Laboratories of Virtue , he interprets the evolving system of criminal punishment as a microcosm of social tensions that characterized the early American republic. Engaging recent work on the history of punishment in England and continental Europe, Meranze traces criminal punishment from the late colonial system of publicly inflicted corporal penalties to the establishment of penitentiaries in the Jacksonian period. Throughout, he reveals a world of class difference and contested values in which those who did not fit the emerging bourgeois ethos were disciplined and eventually segregated. By focusing attention on the system of public penal labor that developed in the 1780s, Meranze effectively links penal reform to the development of republican principles in the Revolutionary era. His study, richly informed by Foucaultian and Freudian theory, departs from recent scholarship that treats penal reform as a nostalgic effort to reestablish social stability. Instead, Meranze interprets the reform of punishment as a forward-looking project. He argues that the new disciplinary practices arose from the reformers' struggle to contain or eliminate contradictions to their vision of an enlightened, liberal republic.
eBook
Humanities out of Joint
Meranze argues that the present challenges to the humanities in the US lie not in a purported decline in student interest but in the humanities' place as a symbolically central, but structurally subordinate, part of American higher education. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, the humanities and the interpretive social sciences were charged with preparing American college students for new roles as democratically capable citizens of a world power. The humanities and interpretive social sciences embodied a \"shadow conception\" of higher education--geared less toward workforce demands or specific vocations than toward democratic citizenship. But this importance was situated in teaching and general education; funding and research prestige were focused in the sciences. As a result, the humanities and interpretive social sciences have borne the brunt of repeated controversies over the place of colleges and universities in American society--from the student revolts of the 1960s through the Canon Wars of the 1980s to the current demands that higher education ensure students' long-term income. In the present moment of ongoing financial crisis, this contradictory position has left the humanities overburdened and under-recognized both within and beyond the university.
Journal Article
Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution
Drawing on examples from different local and regional contexts,Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolutiondemonstrates the many remarkably local ways that revolution and empire were experienced in London, Pennsylvania, Pitcairn Island, and points in between.
eBook
America's Death Penalty
Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism.
America's Death Penaltytakes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America.
Contributors:David Garland, Douglas Hay, Randall McGowen, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, and Jonathan Simon.
eBook