Louis Masur is Associate Professor of History at City College of New York. He is the author of Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (Oxford, 1989).

Masur brings together the personal letters, diary entries, and journal articles of some of the most distinguished writers of the time to constitute a striking literary landscape. Included are works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, and many others.