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Article: Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, New England printers published hundreds of books, pamphlets, and broadsides relating to the lives and deaths of criminals. This literature encompassed a wide variety of genres, including scaffold sermons, conversion narratives, dying verses, last speeches, biographies, trial reports, crime novels, and newspaper reports. In Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace, Daniel A. Cohen explores how New Englanders, both high and low, created this literature. Although the subtitle suggests that this study is limited to the origins of popular culture, Cohen has achieved much more. In what amounts to an elegantly written series of ...