Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who Have Been Condemned and Executed for

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
1.7M words
Chapters
168

Tags

English Originals General Biography Historical ReappraisalCourt RecordsAntiheroMarginal FiguresHuman NatureCriminal PsychologySocial CritiqueMoral DilemmaDark AtmosphereTrue Crime

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed forAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: HV: Social sciences: Social pathology, Social and Public Welfare, Release Date: Aug 3, 2004

Editor's review

This book is a compilation of biographies of criminals condemned and executed in British history, belonging to social and criminal history source material. In the form of short biographies it records cases and punishments, reflecting the judicial practice, notions of social order, and conditions of lower-class life of a particular era. For researchers, such a compilation can serve as primary material on how criminal narratives were written and how crime and punishment were understood by the public; for general readers, it offers a window into the darker side of historical society, though its narrative style is old-fashioned reportage, focusing on the course of events rather than modern psychological analysis. Read with awareness of the historical context, distinguishing the moral judgments of the time from today's judicial views, and do not treat it as light sensational reading. Overall it is suitable as supplementary reading for social history, legal history, or British history.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and introductory passages first to understand the compilation's format and period background, then choose individual cases.
  2. After reading several biographies, note the types of cases and reasons for verdicts, and observe common features of judicial thinking.
  3. Read alongside sources on modern British social history, avoiding simple judgment of historical cases by today's standards.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Who is the author of this book? The author field in the information shows Project Gutenberg, which is usually the label of the eBook distribution platform rather than the actual compiler. The book is a public-domain historical compilation released by Project Gutenberg; the original compiler information should be checked on the title page of the electronic text.
Is the content suitable for academic citation? It can be used as a primary text for understanding historical criminal narratives and judicial discourse, but the version source should be verified and supported by serious historical scholarship. The Gutenberg eBook is easy to search; citations should note the electronic text source and date of access.
What should readers keep in mind? The book involves executions and criminal details, and its narration carries period prejudices and moralizing. Read critically, focusing on how the text describes criminals and society rather than taking its judgments as objective conclusions.

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