Michael A. Trotti is professor of history at Ithaca College. He is the author of The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South.
"Recommended . . . . Trotti employs both quantitative and qualitative evidence to support his conclusions, and his detailed analyses of various datasets and statistics are particularly impressive.""--CHOICE Trotti's book is a fascinating study of the subversive power of communal faith.""--The Christian Century [Trotti] weaves a wholly unexpected story for how the New South ended up at the electric chair. His narrative, backed by extensive evidence and data drawn from 1,300 executions carried out in the former Confederate states between the end of the Civil War and 1936, is less a story of the consolidation of state power through technological and political means than a history driven by the agency of Southern African Americans resisting a paranoid and reactive state.""--The Civil War Monitor This focused study opens up vital questions about religion, public space, and punishment in American life and brings an ignored archive into view for American religion.""--American Religion"