Executed Today

Executed Today is a blog of history, sociology, biography, criminology, law, and kismet — an unrepresentative but arresting view of the human condition across time and circumstance from the parlous vantage of the scaffold. ...

The death penalty, as a subset within that vast category of “acts of violence homo sapiens do to their fellows,” blends insensibly into a dozen adjacent territories — murder, assassination, warfare, torture, low crime and high statecraft, even suicide.

If we know for certain that extinguishing life is an essential component of the death penalty, our everyday language nevertheless reflects ambiguity about how. We might speak of crime victims as being “killed execution-style” to evoke a sense of deliberation and even ceremony about the act; conversely, we might derogate the formal and official act of a state organ as a “summary execution” to underscore the absence of an appropriate juridical atmosphere. In situations of war and revolution where the legitimate authority of the state is contested, the water muddies still further.

and, just to be clear...

This blog is neither pro- nor anti-death penalty in general nor in any particular. Its interest is the perspective on humanity we gain through the window of this human institution.

From Cave Paintings to the Internet

Jeremy Norman's History of Science

When I completed the conversion in October 2008 there were more than 1550 annotated timeline entries, nearly all of which had one or more hyperlinks to online references. There were also sixty-four themes, by which the timeline could be searched. Individual timeline entries were indexed by up to six themes. You will find links to each theme at the end of each timeline entry. If you click on that theme after the entry you will see a timeline based on that theme alone. You can, of course, access the timeline by various different eras, and you can switch back and forth between eras and themes. Users should recognize that in order to trace the origins of concepts or technologies back in time I have sometimes defined themes loosely. In order to make some themes more accessible to historical treatment I have also combined related themes. For example, I combined Internet and Networking in order to trace this theme back to the first road networks in the ancient world, to railroads, to the telegraph lines that followed railroad lines, to telephone networks, up the network of networks that is the Internet.

Jesus H. Timesink. Get to reading!
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