The New Newgate Calendar
Post Archives
Archives for November 2015
I’ve written before about pirates – and posted a short video-slideshow thingy on Vimeo about them. I’m fascinated by piracy, and by the...
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On this date in 1557, the handless Mapuche cacique Galvarino was executed by the Spanish during the Arauco War. The Mapuche people, still extant today,...
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The petition of Ester Cutler (1715) I’ve spent the last couple of months on a mission to find petitions in the Sessions Papers of London Lives. The...
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McKay’s Bakery was a Kempton landmark that was run by the same family since 1857. Originally located in a large brick building at the southern end...
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On this date in 1986, during the opening months of a guerrilla war that would last until 1992, a 70-man detachment of Suriname soldiers raided the village...
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This is the supposed martyrdom date, in the year 764 or perhaps 765, of St. Stephen the Younger in Constantinople at the hands of an iconoclastic emperor....
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I am now two months into my PhD research: I have given my first talk, spent a day in the archives, submitted a conference abstract, sent lots of emails...
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In the Musée Départemental Alexandre Franconie in Cayenne there is a room dedicated to the history of the French colonial bagne (prison)....
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For many generations from the 14th to 17th centuries, new Ottoman heirs maintained themselves by the cruel practice of preventive fratricide. Enforced...
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China on this date in 2009 executed two men for trafficking kidnapped children. “The crimes of children trafficking are on the rise,” said...
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The latest interim post (while authoring two separate volumes) is inspired by two recent events. First, the tragic case in New York, in which a woman surgically...
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We ask you how the Muscogee Nation came by this country? You came from the west and took the country from another people who were in possession. After...
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The Hamilton Gaol was built in the 1830s, at a time when the town’s population of 789 people comprised more than 50 per cent convicts. It was an...
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On this date in 1950, Norman Goldthorpe hanged at Norwich prison. Goldthorpe’s was an open-and-shut case. In a drunken fury when his married lover...
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On this date in 1825, alleged carbonari plotters Angelo Targhini and Leonidas Montanari were guillotined by Papal executioner Mastro Titta. This excommunicate...
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In 1841, well-known convict architect James Blackburn designed the two sandstone watch houses at the entrance to St John's Avenue. Both had an entrance...
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German jurist Matthäus Enzlin was beheaded in Urach on this date in 1613. Way back in 1514, a need of funds and political support to crush a popular...
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On this date in 1834, the Cherokee James Graves was hanged in Spring Place, Georgia, for murder. He’s the only person ever executed in Georgia’s...
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On this date in 1829, the Kentucky town of Greenup strung up martyrs to the slave economy. Our incident begins with a slaver by the name of Gordon who,...
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From William Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno Harriet Haines, or Hayes, was a ‘notorious’ character, known as the Wild...
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Penal transportation to Australia is a fascinating subject for anyone interested in England’s history of crime and punishment. What we should make...
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(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on the Last...
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Court records document more than policing patterns and criminalised behaviours of the past. While they are crucial to writing criminal justice histories,...
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On this date in 1813, 19-year-old Ezra Hutchinson was hanged in the western Massachusetts village of Lenox for raping a 14-year-old named Lucy Bates. Hutchinson...
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Tunbridge is the site of Australia's oldest single span wooden bridge. Spanning the Blackman River, the bridge was built by convicts in 1848 and is a rare...
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The BBC recently published an interesting post on their website that I linked to on Twitter, but is also worth highlighting here. The story details how...
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(As this blog has often enough bestowed its disdain on Puritan holy roller Cotton Mather, one of the never-apologetic architects of the Salem witch trials,...
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Prior to the war certain European nations, and especially those now ranged against us, regarded our Easern Dependency as a country where the great Mutiny...
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On this date in 1996, Ellis Wayne Felker was elecrocuted for a rape-murder that — despite his classic middle name — he always maintained he...
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Built by the Presbyterian church after representations were made to Governor Franklin in the 1830’s.The church was planned after the appointment...
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Though not exactly the capital of capital punishment, the Peach State has a foundational place in the modern death penalty regime. It was through a case...
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Minutes after midnight on this date in 1996, Georgia electrocuted Larry Lonchar Ten grand in the red on gambling debts, Lonchar in 1986 raided the home...
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Laura Bentley was in dire straits. A 41-year-old Londoner, she supported her bedridden mother, who she lived with in lodgings in Delancey Street,...
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“So great a concourse of people has perhaps not been seen”* at Edinburgh’s Grassmarket as assembled on this date in 1765 for the execution...
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Introduction Home Office and Prison Commission Licences are one of the core sources being used by the Digital Panopticon to trace the lives of nineteenth...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this day in 1800,* a seventeen-year-old mail sorter named Thomas Chalfont was...
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On this date in 1954, railway official Ewald Misera and civil engineer Karli Bandelow (German link, as are many that follow) were beheaded in Dresden as...
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An unusual and highly memorable Victorian timber building constructed in 1888 as the Commercial Bank of Tasmania and residence. The richly detailed facades...
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By Michaela Ann Cameron Me at Brislington House promoting the Convict Parramatta walking tour I developed for the free Dictionary of Sydney Walks...
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On this date in 1944, the Gestapo publicly hanged 13 men without trial at an S-Bahn station near Cologne. Heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II,...
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by Grace Huxford Lecturer in Nineteenth/Twentieth Century History, University of Bristol At the Carceral Archipelago conference held in September at the...
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Elizabeth Morley’s petition for mercy, 1795 In the spring of 1795, Elizabeth Morley (or Morlay) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1945, stripped down to his socks and underwear, 35-year-old truck...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1944, Private Joseph Watson and Technician Fifth Grade Willie...
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Captain Henry Frederick Forth arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1833 and for a few years he was employed as Director General Of Roads & Bridges. In 1836...
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A murderer named Alexander Provan was put to death on this date in 1765, the very rare* instance of a Scottish execution enhanced with mutilation. Provan,...
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On November 6, 1863, Old Geelong Gaol (op. cit.) hosted the hanging of James Murphy. This horse thief, having been put to some light piece of penal servitude...
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Fred’s resting place (© Criminal Historian) In the shadow of the Lucy Tower of Lincoln Castle – site of the city’s Georgian and...
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To mark Bonfire Night in a somewhat macabre way, here’s a cheery tale from the Western Mail of 5 November 1895 (accessed via the wonderful Welsh...
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One century ago today, California hanged two men at San Quentin: Earl Loomis, who murdered a Sacramento candy store proprietress in the course of a robbery,...
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