A history of public executions in France from the medieval spectacle of suffering to the invention of the Revolutionary guillotine, up to the last public execution in 1939. Paul Friedland explores why spectacles of public execution were staged, as well as why thousands of spectators came to watch them.

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

Keller explores a life of justice empowered by an experience of grace.

Ingrid Torfa lives two lives. In one she struggles to get by as a book illustrator in the tiny town of Runde on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. But in the other, she serves as a Norse witch, a volva, in the town of Villmark, where the descendants of a lost colony of Vikings hides inside a pocket dimension far from the reach of the modern world. Usually, balancing the needs of those two worlds dominate her time and energy. But this time, Villmark offers her trouble enough to consume her. Young men keep disappearing in the fields south of Villmark, a place of no danger in the past. The council tells her to leave it to the guardians known as the Thors. Then one of the Thors turns up with mixed up memories. And a missing brother. Now not even the council can stop Ingrid from getting to the bottom of this latest mystery. Because her own Thorbjorn just might be next.

This book deals with the fascinating debate over the concept of justice proposed by two contemporary thinkers, namely, John Rawls and Amartya Sen. Justice means what is just, but how do we know what is just? What would be the viable criterion to legitimize justice? Is justice objective or subjective? Is justice a matter of ontological issue or an issue of realization? What would be the paradigm of justice? These are some important issues discussed in the book. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.