Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace

by Cohen, Daniel A.

• ISBN13: 9781558495296
• ISBN10: 1558495290
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: UCP

Summary

In this innovative study, Daniel A. Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.

Author Biography

Daniel A. Cohen is associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University

Table of Contents

1. An Overview,	3	(38)
I Saints and Sinners
The Literature of Protestant Piety
2. Pillars of Salt and Monuments of Grace,	41	(18)
3. Toward a Great Awakening,	59	(24)
II Paradigms and Polemics
The Literature of Doctrinal Development
4. The Road to the Scaffold,	83	(18)
5. In Defense of the Gallows,	101	(16)
III Criminals and Innocents
The Literature of Social Insurgency
6. A Fellowship of Thieves,	117	(26)
7. Injured Innocents,	143	(24)
IV Trials and Tribulations
The Literature of Legal Romanticism
8. The Story of Jason Fairbanks,	167	(28)
9. The Prostitute and the Somnambulist,	195	(52)
10. Conclusion,	247	(8)
Notes,	255	(84)
Index,	339