Here are 100 books that Laboratories of Virtue fans have personally recommended if you like
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At age eighteen, as a part-time employee of a prisoners’ rights group, I visited an archipelago of decrepit prisons, all relics of an earlier age. My job was gathering inmates’ accounts of bucket toilets, unheated cells, bugs, molds, and rats. Soon after, I began reading and writing about prison reform and its history. And in the many decades since, whether practicing or teaching criminal law, I never lost sight of prisons and their problems. Several of these five books fed my young fascination with prison reform. All of them still challenge me to imagine true and enduring reform.
Tracking the movement for prison reform to American shores, McLennan documents the grim consequences of grafting incarceration with capitalism.
In her telling, the North’s contract labor system took root amid the new industries of Jacksonian America and flourished in the Gilded Age alongside the South’s proto-plantation convict lease camps. Vast penal industrial plants in almost every state proved how foolhardy early reformers had been to think a state enterprise could long abide by its reforming ideals.
America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Now, I’m a journalist who covers prisons—but a decade ago I was in prison myself. I’d landed there on a heroin charge after years of struggling with addiction as I bumbled my way through college. Behind bars, I read voraciously, almost as if making up for all the assignments I’d left half-done during my drug years. As I slowly learned to rebuild and reinvent myself, I also learned about recovery and hope, and the reality of our nation’s carceral system really is. Hopefully, these books might help you learn those things, too.
One thing prisons purposely do not do is teach you anything about the history of prisons. If you want to do that, you’ll have to do it on your own—and Oshinsky is such a great start. His 1996 book details the roots of Parchman prison in Mississippi and draws a line from slavery to convict leasing to modern-day penal farms.
In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.
Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on police records, prison documents, folklore, blues songs, and oral history, from the days of cotton-field chain gangs to the 1960s, when Parchman was…
I have been captivated by the study of prisons since my early college years. The fact that prisons are so new in human history still feels mind-blowing to me. I used to think that prisons have just always been around, but when you realize they are actually new, that has major implications. This is nowhere more clear than at the beginning: how hard it was to get to the point where prisons made sense to people, to agree on how prisons should be designed and managed, and to keep on the same path when prisons very quickly started to fail. It’s still puzzling to me.
Prisons were originally built for men (really, white men), not for women. But women were sent to prison, just not in big enough numbers to merit their own facilities until much later. Women were also viewed as a difficult population by reformers and prison administrators alike: Women who committed crimes were deemed so morally repugnant that they could not be rehabilitated, so the routines and purposes of prisons seemed not to apply to them (prisons were originally supposed to rehabilitate their prisoners).
As a small and unprofitable population (because they were assigned unprofitable labor like sewing and laundry), women prisoners were considered especially burdensome. Using the prison histories of three differently situated states, Rafter describes the experiences of incarcerated women and how those experiences were shaped by their unique position and the biases about women criminals.
Contemporary Research on crime, prisons, and social control has largely ignored women. Partial Justice, the only full-scale study of the origins and development of women's prisons in the United States, traces their evolution from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It shows that the character of penal treatment was involved in the very definition of womanhood for incarcerated women, a definition that varied by race and social class.Rafter traces the evolution of women's prisons, showing that it followed two markedly different models. Custodial institutions for women literally grew out of men's penitentiaries, starting from a separate room for…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I have been captivated by the study of prisons since my early college years. The fact that prisons are so new in human history still feels mind-blowing to me. I used to think that prisons have just always been around, but when you realize they are actually new, that has major implications. This is nowhere more clear than at the beginning: how hard it was to get to the point where prisons made sense to people, to agree on how prisons should be designed and managed, and to keep on the same path when prisons very quickly started to fail. It’s still puzzling to me.
Unlike my other recommendations, this book takes a longer historical view of the prison and also provides a more sociological framework for understanding trends in penal history, focusing on the prison but also its sister punishments like parole and probation. Breaking the Pendulum focuses on the full history of the prison in the United States, from its origins to now. But more importantly, it synthesizes the state-of-the-art knowledge from punishment studies about how to think about and understand punishment: points like recognizing geographical variation rather than focusing on the national picture and recognizing that even periods that seem to be fairly homogenous in their penal policies are actually periods with a lot of hidden debate.
From there, it moves away from the standard narrative of a pendulum swinging between punitive and rehabilitative or liberal and conservative approaches to punishment to a more accurate and mixed picture, and for thinking about…
The history of criminal justice in the U.S. is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. While this view is common wisdom, it is wrong. In Breaking the Pendulum, Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps systematically debunk the pendulum perspective, showing that it distorts how and why criminal justice changes. The pendulum model blinds us to the blending of penal orientations, policies, and practices, as well as the struggle between actors that shapes laws, institutions, and how we think about crime, punishment, and related issues.
Little House on the Prairie, Roots, the Bicentennial, family vacations, and an early childhood in New Orleans all shaped my perception of the world as a place overlaying history. Although I could not have completely articulated this then, I specifically wanted to know what women before me had done, I wanted to know about parts of the story that seemed to be in the shadows of the places where I consumed history, and I wanted to know “the real story.” The intensity of recreating a person’s world and their experience in it made me question how historians know what we know, and how deeply myth, nostalgia, or even preconceptions guide readings of the evidence. The authors here all show an awareness that re-telling a person’s life can move it away from the evidence and they try to return to that evidence and find the “real story,” or as near to it as possible.
Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. That’s the legend, which did not appear until her grandchildren started to capitalize on tourism to the Philadelphia Centennial celebrations in 1876. The real Betsy Ross proves far more exciting. She sewed flags, but she was also an artisan, a businesswoman, a Quaker who was too political for her Meeting, and involved in the public protests leading up to the Revolution. Miller connects family networks, the material culture of the drapery and textile industries, British trade policies, and Revolutionary politics and protest into a whole cloth. This is a visceral look at the War for Independence from one of its epicenters and the vantage of one of its most iconic women.
Beyond the legend of the creation of the American flag, we know very little about the facts of Betsy Ross' life. Perhaps with one snip of her scissors she convinced the nation's future first president that five-pointed stars suited better than six. Perhaps not. Miller recovers for the first time the full story of Betsy Ross, sharing the woman as she truly was. Miller pieces together the fascinating life of this little-known and much beloved figure, showing that she is important to our history not just because she made a flag, but because she embraced the resistance movement with vigour,…
I have had an interest in history for over 30 years. My main interest was the American Revolutionary and the Federalist/War of 1812 eras. I like these periods because they were intriguing, fun, and informative as to what happened before and how a nation grew and developed. I found this more engaging when I visited the various locations of battlefields, houses, and legal buildings (all of Washington DC is an example). It helped me to understand the mammoth task of the individuals trying to make something out of a fledging former British colony, into one of the more formidable powerhouses in modern society. It's a wonder that I now live in the mother country!
The story is like the book, Valley Forge, but in the British point of view of a soldier under General Sir William Howe. The British took over Philadelphia, spending a lavish winter there, whilst the American army freezes in Valley Forge. There are rebels and loyalists everywhere, but who is who? Well placed on the list because of attention to detail.
From THE BESTSELLING author Bernard Cornwell comes Redcoat . . .
Philadelphia in 1777 is a city at war - not just between American troops and the British army, but within itself. For an occupied city throws together loyalist and patriot, soldier and civilian, man and woman; divides families and breeds treachery.
Here ruthless Captain Kit Vane and beautiful Martha Crowl, passionate patriot Caroline and her idealist young lover Jonathon, unscrupulous Ezra Woollard and the brutal Sergeant Scammell, forge and break shifting allegiances that drive them to dangerous lengths. And caught between them Private Sam Gilpin, seduced into war by…
I have loved American history all my life. I thought I knew the events and key figures in the American Revolution. Then, in 2001, I learned about Dr. Joseph Warren. The more I learned, the more I wanted to tell his story. I travelled to Boston. I walked the Freedom Trail. I followed the red bricks that wind through historic Boston until they end at Bunker Hill. I saw the marble statue of Dr. Warren at Bunker Hill honoring his death. His influence and footprints are on every location along the Freedom Trail. My passion is to tell his story; my hope is that all Americans can remember his sacrifice.
I love to find “hidden gems” in history. Ona Judge is a gem. First published in 2017, Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge is a biography that reads like an engaging novel. It depicts the life of George and Martha Washington’s young enslaved girl that grows to a young woman in the shadows of the most powerful couple in our new nation. At age 16, Ona leaves Mount Vernon to accompany President Washington and Martha while they live in New York and then Philadelphia. She is treated splendidly, but she is still property. This terrible truth crashes upon Ona when Martha, wanting to give the absolute best gift she can to her difficult, disagreeable, and stubborn granddaughter, decides to give her Ona – her most cherished possession, as a wedding gift. Rather than be property to be gifted and given, Ona escapes. This book shows how President…
"A brilliant work of US history." -School Library Journal (starred review) "Gripping." -BCCB (starred review) "Accessible...Necessary." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction, Never Caught is the eye-opening narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington's runaway slave, who risked everything for a better life-now available as a young reader's edition!
In this incredible narrative, Erica Armstrong Dunbar reveals a fascinating and heartbreaking behind-the-scenes look at the Washingtons when they were the First Family-and an in-depth look at their slave, Ona Judge, who dared to escape from one of the nation's Founding Fathers.
I was too young for the actual Bicentennial, but it still was the reason why I'm a historian of the American Revolution. With all the excitement about early American history in the years after 1976, at age 5, it was my job to convince my mother to take me to Lexington Green as often as I could. The problems of why a people who were the most socially mobile, comfortable, with the greatest access to representative government would start a revolution have fascinated me since then. Tyrants and Rogues is my fourth book that focuses on the 1770s, and especially the consequences of how the contingencies and choices made in 1776 shape our lives today.
What was going on in Philadelphia during what would be the last nine weeks of colonial America? William Hogeland tells us: a lot!
Declaration is a careful walk through the plotting and strategizing of Sam Adams, Tom Paine, Thomas McKean, and others inside and outside Congress trying to get Pennsylvania to overturn an election (sound familiar?) and get them (and other colonies) to support independence.
We’re pretty far from Enlightenment principles here, with “Founding Fathers” scheming to achieve American independence.
This is the rambunctious story of how America came to declare independence in Philadelphia in 1776. As late as that May, the Continental Congress had no plans to break away from England. Troops under General George Washington had been fighting the British for nearly a year—yet in Philadelphia a mighty bloc known as "reconciliationists," led by the influential Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, strove to keep America part of the British Empire.
But a cadre of activists—led by the mysterious Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and assisted by his nervous cousin John—plotted to bring about American independence. Their audacious secret plan proposed overturning…
I have had an interest in history for over 30 years. My main interest was the American Revolutionary and the Federalist/War of 1812 eras. I like these periods because they were intriguing, fun, and informative as to what happened before and how a nation grew and developed. I found this more engaging when I visited the various locations of battlefields, houses, and legal buildings (all of Washington DC is an example). It helped me to understand the mammoth task of the individuals trying to make something out of a fledging former British colony, into one of the more formidable powerhouses in modern society. It's a wonder that I now live in the mother country!
This story concerns a family from the Revolutionary period, going to a re-enactment ball of the Mischianza. This was originally a party given by the British troops in Philadelphia for General Howe. It turns out this family, the Nelsons, are navigating through the modern day, as though they really were from the 18th century (and are playfully shocked at the modern conveniences), but are themselves re-enactors. The narrative has the quirk of being written in the style of the period. Good book, because it is like Back to the Future, with the Future already in situ.
A family of Revolutionary War patriots recently uprooted from their eighteenth century graves mix with modern Americans to the merry confoundment of both! A hilarious, unique sci-fi fantasy
Like most, I grew up reading the classic literature assigned to me at school. But what I always found lacking were characters and themes that related to me—a queer, poor, half-Mexican in 80’s rural Texas. I wanted to be a writer at an early age, but took a 15-year detour as an editor at DC Comics, Scholastic, and other big publishing houses. While there, I was proud to find new diverse talent with new perspectives and voices. Stories are magical when they act as windows through which we learn about others, but they can be even more powerful when they act as mirrors in which we can see ourselves.
Classic stories are great, but you know what’s better? Seeing decades-old books retold with diverse characters. In this instance, Anne is a Black teenager in modern-day Philly dealing with everything from robotics clubs to making new friends. My Abuela was born and raised in Mexico, so I grew up seeing a lot of racism toward her and myself.
I wish she were alive today so I could show her how many books are being written about diverse people by diverse people.
Anne of Green Gables with a twist: in this follow-up to Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy and The Secret Garden on 81st Street, this full-color graphic novel moves Anne Shirley to modern-day West Philadelphia, where where she finds new friends, new rivals, and a new family.
When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert decide to foster a teenage girl for the first time, their lives are changed forever. Their redheaded foster daughter, Anne Shirley, is in search of an exciting life and has decided that West Philly is where she's going to find it. Armed with a big personality and unstoppable creativity,…
