Overview
Buried Lives offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners. Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people imprisoned in locations from Antigua to Boston. The essays draw upon a rich array of archival sources from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, including warden logs, petitions, execution sermons, physicians’ clinical notes, private letters, newspaper articles, runaway slave advertisements, and legal documents. Through the voices, bodies, and texts of the incarcerated, Buried Lives reveals the largely ignored experiences of inmates who contested their subjection to regimes of power.
Full Product Details
Author: Michele Lise Tarter ,
Richard Bell ,
Jacqueline Cahif ,
Matthew Clavin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Imprint: University of Georgia Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.20cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.612kg
ISBN: 9780820341194
ISBN 10: 0820341193
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 01 March 2012
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Language: English
Reviews
Buried Lives is a strong addition to any collection dedicated to crime and punishment throughout history. -- Midwest Book Review <br>
Buried Lives is a welcomed intervention in penal history. By centrally locating inmates, this phenomenal collection of essays spotlights varied voices and incarceration experiences that speak provocatively about the flawed relationship between criminal 'justice' and American democracy. --Kali Nicole Gross, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
The book's contents reflect its geographic origins (about half the volume centers on 18th-century Philadelphia), but as a whole, it lives up to its goal 'to break incarceration free' from the 'historiographical roots' planted by Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and David Rothman. . . . Those previously buried lives include 'vicious men, calculating women, diffident drunks, runaway slaves, immigrant workers, homeless children, victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault . . . the vagrant, the poor, and the enslaved, ' all of which help complicate and enrich the understanding of incarceration in the early US. --M.G. Spencer, Choice
Author Information
Michele Lise Tarter (Editor) MICHELE LISE TARTER is an associate professor of English at the College of New Jersey. She is coeditor of A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Richard Bell (Editor) Richard Bell is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States.
