Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict. Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In "Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, " she examines the social, political, and...

The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero-his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontes, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character's central influence not...

There is growing interest in the history of masculinity and male culture, including violence, as an integral part of a proper understanding of gender. In almost every historical setting, masculinity and violence are closely linked; certainly, violent crime has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise. But violence is not always criminal: in many cultural contexts violence is linked instead to honor and encoded in rituals. We possess only an imperfect understanding of the ways in which aggressive behavior, or the abstention from aggressive behavior, contributes to the construction of masculinity...