| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History. By Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. xiv, 239 pp. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-7914-7437-2.)

M. Watt Espy is a legend among historians and sociologists of the death penalty in America. Since 1970, he has endeavored to collect information on all legal executions in the United States and the respective European colonies before 1776. In their book, Howard D. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb use Espy's work as their main source to define and analyze long-term trends and variations in the use of capital punishment in America from colonial times to World War II, focusing specifically on social biases based on race and class. Allen and Clubb also include lynching, stressing that "the line between lynching and the legal use of the death penalty ... was often far from clear" (p. 1). They argue, as do several other recent studies, that to ignore lynching would leave a history of lethal punishment in America incomplete.

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