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Capital Punishment : Public Opinion And Abolition In Great Britain During The Twentieth Century, Carol A. Ransone

Master's Theses

Some form of capital punishment has been practiced for as long as there has been recorded history. Early laws were generally harsh and failed to consider the impact of crime on society. In 621 B.C. the Code of Dracon recorded the laws observed in Athens. The Code of Dracon revealed that almost all offences were punishable by death. Two centuries later a more humanitarian attitude was expressed in Greece. Plato believed in the segregation and reform of the criminal rather than his execution.

In England the death penalty for felony convictions was traced to the reign of Henry I. It …

The French Revolution : A Comparison Of The Attitudes Of Edmund Burke And Thomas Paine, Christine R. Chaires

Honors Theses

By 1789, when the French people were just becoming absorbed in revolutionary activity, both the United States and Britain already enjoyed relatively stable political systems which asserted fundamental rights of each individual and established a protection of these rights against moral and political infringement. To insure the perpetuation of these 'inalienable' rights, revolutionary Americans fought violently to break the oppressive bonds of a tyrannical monarch. The English, in 1688, more conservatively chose to build upon their existing modes of government. Because the French Revolution sought to abolish many principles on which the British government rested, it would seem logical for …