The history of the contemporary prison and its underlying "liberal mythology" was constructed not only in American reformatories, workhouses, and convict camps, but also in the debate halls of the International Penitentiary Congresses, where American reformers regularly downplayed the magnitude and brutality of the lease system to a global audience. This essay analyzes how convict leasing's depiction in (and omission from) global discourse on penal reform ultimately shaped the language and practice of incarceration in the U.S. South and beyond. Examining convict leasing within the international discourse of nineteenth-century penology illuminates how hard labor regimes - including convict leasing and its imperial analogues - largely escaped international scrutiny while laying the groundwork for the modern carceral state.
This essay considers the changes in Thomas Jefferson's scholarly reputation since the bicentennial of 1976, with particular focus on the impact of revelations about Sally Hemings and Jefferson's mixed-race family, and explores Jefferson's likely role in conversations about the Founding and "all men are created equal" during the build-up to the semiquincentennial of 2026. It argues in particular for considering not only Jefferson's troubled relationship with human equality, but the content of his many conversations with other Americans - Black and white - who were able even in the Founding era to imagine a more expansive vision of belonging and inclusion.
Between 1861 and 1865, hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers received traumatic injuries in service to their country and suddenly found themselves classified as casualties. They witnessed firsthand the ghastly sights and sounds of the field hospital, endured the torturous journey from the front lines to a general hospital miles away, and suffered through agonizing procedures. Cast into the custody of the army's medical corps, wounded soldiers often found themselves stripped of their ability to make even the basic decisions regarding the care and comfort of their broken bodies. Instead, the systematized nature of the field medical service, coupled with the sheer number of casualties produced in each engagement, threatened to supplant wounded soldiers' individual identity with stoic descriptions of their wounds, treatment, and prognosis. Consequently, there remained a tension between soldiers, who desired to retain autonomy over their medical care and the military surgeons who were bound by the regulations and expectations set before them by the Surgeon General and United States Medical Department.
