On this vaguely snowy morning in Cambridge, we have a couple of public radio interviews with HUP authors to share.
Yesterday, David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, took part in an extended conversation about the death penalty with Leonard Lopate on his WNYC show. The two covered a lot of ground in their discussion of the peculiarities of America’s history with capital punishment, including the roles of religion and race. You can listen to their conversation here.
And this morning, Suzanne E. Smith, author of To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. As part of a series called “American Lives,” they discussed A.G. Gaston, an African American entrepreneur who made funeral homes the cornerstone of what became a wide-ranging portfolio of business interests. Gaston played a behind-the-scenes role in the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, and Smith and Inskeep discussed the general lack of historical attention to the role of entrepreneurship in the Civil Rights era. You can hear their conversation and read an excerpt from To Serve the Living here.
