Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture)

Cohen, Daniel A.

ISBN 10: 1558495290 / ISBN 13: 9781558495296

Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2006

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture)
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1558495290
• ISBN 13: 9781558495296
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

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Synopsis

In this innovative study, Daniel A. Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.

About the Author

DANIEL A. COHEN is associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University.