Simultaneous with — but in many senses outside — the Protestant Reformation sweeping continental Europe, England in the 16th and early 17th centuries shook with the day’s fatal upheaval.
If the transition from Catholicism proposed by Henry VIII appears theologically mild in retrospect, it wrought earth-shattering changes: desperate conflict between faiths in shifting dynastic alliances; the germ of a vast middle class seeded with confiscation of the Church’s enormous estates; the evolution of governmental forms — and political theory — to comport with a landscape of redistributed power.
Many thousands suffered the ultimate penalty in those days for reasons godly, venal, or a little of both. The next three dates frame the contest over a century’s time, the violent birth of modern England.
The elimination of public executions in America might have aimed at public decorum, but it certainly did not remove executions from the domain of spectacle.
Inevitably, death attracts attention.
Over hedge rows — outside prison walls — in pulpits, legislatures, and the rising din of the mass media — the spectacle took new forms.
The next three dates all capture American executions after the end of public hangings … and the new ways this now-secret punishment announced itself in the communities carrying it out.
Inherited from England, the ceremony and theater of public hangings in the youthful United States and its antecedent colonies present an almost impossibly dramatic variety for characters, costumes and stagecraft. The ritual has — at least in the U.S.A. — slipped out of time into history, myth, even kitsch.
How representative of public hangings are any of the phenomenon’s instantly recognizable tropes remains another matter.
The next four dates offer a handful that alongside their inherent interest suggest — if only by illustration — the diverse circumstances that have gathered men and women under the gallows in the New World.
During the last century B.C.E., Rome was convulsed by civil wars. When the flames subsided, the Roman Empire had been born out of the ashes of the Republic — though the powerless forms of the latter were diligently preserved by the emperors.
The three executions remembered next all took place during — and as consequence of — this epochal struggle for power.
The entries of today and tomorrow will hardly be the last women, the last anti-fascists, or the last women anti-fascists to grace these pages.
But this small themed set offers a complementary couplet of resistance: women of almost diametrically opposed circumstances who in vastly different ways opposed fascism at the risk (and ultimately, the forfeit) of their lives.
One of the occasional conceits these pages will indulge is the predilection of history for unexpected combinations and rhythms. The next three days’ entries are not individually related, but capture a snapshot both of an avocation liable to inclusion in these pages and of an era — the great power jockeying of the early 20th century — through the lives of three men who spied upon one another’s countries.
Simultaneous with — but in many senses outside — the Protestant Reformation sweeping continental Europe, England in the 16th and early 17th centuries shook with the day’s fatal upheaval.
One of the occasional conceits these pages will indulge is the predilection of history for unexpected combinations and rhythms. The next three days’ entries are not individually related, but capture a snapshot both of an avocation liable to inclusion in these pages and of an era — the great power jockeying of the early 20th century — through the lives of three men who spied upon one another’s countries.
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