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Mutiny on the Bounty is one of history's greatest naval stories—yet few know the similar tale from America's own fledgling navy in the dying days of the Age of Sail, a tale of mutiny and death at sea on an American warship. In 1842, the brig-of-war Somers set out on a training cruise for apprentice seamen, commanded by rising star Alexander Mackenzie. Somers was crammed with teenagers. Among them was Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, a disturbed youth and a son of the U.S. Secretary of War. Buying other crew members' loyalty with pilfered tobacco and alcohol, Spencer dreamed up a scheme to kill the officers and turn Somers into a pirate ship. In the isolated world of a warship, a single man can threaten the crew's discipline and the captain's authority. But one of Spencer's followers warned Mackenzie, who arrested the midshipman and chained him and other ringleaders to the quarterdeck. Fearing efforts to rescue the prisoners, officers had to stay awake in round-the-clock watches. Steering desperately for land, sleep-deprived and armed to the teeth, battling efforts to liberate Spencer, Somers's captain and officers finally faced a fateful choice: somehow keep control of the vessel until reaching port—still hundreds of miles away—or hang the midshipman and his two leading henchmen before the boys could take over the ship. The results shook the nation. A naval investigation of the affair turned into a court-martial and a state trial and led to the founding of the Naval Academy to provide better officers for the still-young republic. Mackenzie's controversial decision may have inspired Herman Melville's great work Billy Budd. The story of Somers raises timeless questions still disturbing in twenty-first-century America: the relationship between civil and military law, the hazy line between peace and war, the battle between individual rights and national security, and the ultimate challenge of command at sea.
The sequel to Brothers at War finds best friends Jacob and Eli on opposite sides of the battlefield as the War of 1812 erupts. Jacob and Eli may be blood brothers, but they are on opposite sides in the battle of Queenston Heights during the War of 1812. While Jacob joins John Norton's Mohawk band fighting with the British-Canadian side, Eli fights with the Americans. The Canadians win the day, but the victory comes at a great cost: the death of General Brock. Eli is captured and jailed. Because he swore the oath of allegiance to the Crown before he left Canada, his return with the invaders makes him a traitor. He is charged with high treason -- a hanging offence. Can Jacob save his friend from the gallows?
Time: 1889. Place: Wyoming Territory. Homesteading along the Sweetwater River could prove unhealthy or even fatal as Ella Watson and Jim Averell would attestwere they alive to attest. Wealthy ranchers did not take kindly to anyone appropriating parcels of their prime grazing land, legality be damned. They elected to make examples of Ella and Jim. Then, deciding among themselves that the two were cattle thieves, kidnapped and hung them in broad daylight. Reputable ranchers, after all, had every right to protect what was theirs. Three witnesses to the abduction quite suddenly disappeared from the landscape. Frank Buchanan, enamored with Ella, single-handedly tries to save her, only to fail and become the only eyewitness to the hanging. Witnesses were having a run of poor health, and the ranchers were determined that Frank Buchanan would not escape this epidemic. Frank had other ideas.
Friend or villain? Brother or traitor? This compelling story of wartime friendship brings the looming War of 1812 to dramatic life. Jacob is a steadfast Loyalist. Eli is a newcomer to Upper Canada, whose family has just moved from the American South. The two boys become fast friends, but their friendship is tested when Eli's father refuses to pledge allegiance to the Crown. As Loyalists in Upper Canada become more and more suspicious of those with American leanings, the looming war threatens to pull the boys -- and their town -- apart. Peopled with key figures from the War of 1812, such as General Isaac Brock and newspaperman-turned-traitor Joseph Willcocks, Brothers at War portrays the tense era just before the War of 1812, which pitted neighbour against neighbour as Upper Canada prepared to fend off invading American forces.
This book provides an overview of capital punishment in Japan in a legal, historical, social, cultural and political context. It provides new insights into the system, challenges traditional views and arguments and seeks the real reasons behind the retention of capital punishment in Japan.
The Long Road to Annapolis examines the origins of the United States Naval Academy and the national debate that led to its founding. --from publisher description
The first historical study—and a riveting account—of the last execution in Michigan. On September 24, 1830, Stephen G. Simmons, a fifty-year-old tavern keeper and farmer, was hanged in Detroit for murdering his wife, Levana Simmons, in a drunken, jealous rage. Michigan executed only two people during the fifty-year period, from 1796 to 1846, when the death penalty was legal within its boundaries. Simmons was the second and last person to be executed under Michigan law. In A Hanging in DetroitDavid G. Chardavoyne vividly evokes not only the crime, trial, and execution of Simmons, but also the setting and players of the drama, social and legal customs of the times, and the controversy that arose because of the affair. Chardavoyne illuminates his account of this important moment in Michigan's history with many little-known facts, creating a study that is at once an engrossing story and the first historical examination of the event that helped bring about the abolition of the death penalty in Michigan. Simmons execution came at a time when Michigan had begun to change from a sparsely populated wilderness to a thriving agricultural center, and Detroit from a small military outpost to a metropolis founded on trade, manufacturing, and an influx of immigrants and other settlers. The hanging was a defining moment during this period of dramatic social change. Thousands of spectators crowded into Detroit expecting to see a thrilling public execution. Many of those spectators, however, left deeply disturbed by the spectacle they had witnessed. Chardavoyne, a lawyer, probes the unsettling incident which sparked a profound shift in attitudes toward capital punishment in Michigan, examining along the way such mysteries as why Simmons was hanged for his crime when other contemporary killers were hardly punished at all. A Hanging in Detroit will fascinate legal historians and lay readers alike with its incisive look into Great Lakes regional history and crime and punishment in Michigan.
2021 Nebraska Book Award Never Caught Twice presents the untold history of horse raiding and stealing on the Great Plains of western Nebraska. By investigating horse stealing by and from four Plains groups--American Indians, the U.S. Army, ranchers and cowboys, and farmers--Matthew S. Luckett clarifies a widely misunderstood crime in Western mythology and shows that horse stealing transformed plains culture and settlement in fundamental and surprising ways. From Lakota and Cheyenne horse raids to rustling gangs in the Sandhills, horse theft was widespread and devastating across the region. The horse's critical importance in both Native and white societies meant that horse stealing destabilized communities and jeopardized the peace throughout the plains, instigating massacres and murders and causing people to act furiously in defense of their most expensive, most important, and most beloved property. But as it became increasingly clear that no one legal or military institution could fully control it, would-be victims desperately sought a solution that would spare their farms and families from the calamitous loss of a horse. For some, that solution was violence. Never Caught Twice shows how the story of horse stealing across western Nebraska and the Great Plains was in many ways the story of the old West itself.
On a frosty day in February 1862, hundreds gathered to watch the execution of Nathaniel Gordon. Two years earlier, Gordon had taken Africans in chains from the Congo -- a hanging offense for more than forty years that no one had ever enforced. But with the country embroiled in a civil war and Abraham Lincoln at the helm, a sea change was taking place. Gordon, in the wrong place at the wrong time, got caught up in the wave. For the first time, Hanging Captain Gordon chronicles the trial and execution of the only man in history to face conviction for slave trading -- exploring the many compelling issues and circumstances that led to one man paying the price for a crime committed by many. Filled with sharply drawn characters, Soodalter's vivid account sheds light on one of the more shameful aspects of our history and provides a link to similar crimes against humanity still practiced today.