Liberty's Prisoners by Jen Manion

Liberty's Prisoners by Jen Manion

Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a holding tank for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

"Liberty's Prisoners is a very smart book, packed full of original insights and new perspectivesIt makes significant contributions to a wide array of cutting-edge scholarly concerns in the history of the early American republic, crime and punishment in America, and the history of gender and sexuality."-Bruce Dorsey, Swarthmore College "By studying the lives of incarcerated African American, immigrant, and poor white women, Liberty's Prisoners describes the expansion of punishment and penal authority as a conscious effort to reassert social control in the Revolution's wake."-Mary Frances Berry, University of Pennsylvania "Jen Manion's absorbing and important book adds many new layers to our understanding of the penitentiary system as it emerged in the early American republic. Manion shows the central roles played by gender and sexuality in the project of containing liberty through incarceration, as well as the close association between African Americans and criminality in this early phase of the prison system's history. Liberty's Prisoners reminds us how impossible it is to understand the history of freedom and its negation without placing gender, sex, and race at the center of that story."-Richard Godbeer, Virginia Commonwealth University

Jen Manion is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812247572
ISBN 10	0812247574
Title	Liberty's Prisoners
Author	Jen Manion
Series	Early American Studies
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	University of Pennsylvania Press
Year published	2015-10-29
Number of pages	296
Prizes	Winner of Awarded the 2016 Mary Kelley Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic 2021
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.