Seth Kotch Profile picture
Historian, UNC-CH Department of American Studies. Occasional apple grower. Director, Southern Oral History Program. Death penalty book: https://t.co/HPPSdLOYVs
Jun 14, 2020 25 tweets 7 min read
Thinking abt how @UNC's campus is larded w the names of enslavers, segregationists, and traitors. Sharing what I've learned. Thanks to @amwhisnant (unchistory.web.unc.edu) and Yonni Chapman and Anne’s students for much of this information. Also to the @dailytarheel. Aycock (dorm): Charles Aycock, governor, segregationist, white supremacist whose speeches riled up white mobs that attacked Wilmington in 1898. “White men will not submit to [Black] domination in North Carolina.”
May 30, 2019 13 tweets 4 min read
New Hampshire abolished execution today. Good news. It's worth thinking for a minute about the history of death penalty abolition, lest we think it's a product of our recent wokeness.

#deathpenalty thread. Should be grading papers so it'll be long.

appealpolitics.org/2019/new-hamps… Enlightenment Americans wanted to set America apart from Old Europe, and thought banning the death penalty would be a good way to do it. Thomas Jefferson tried to further limit Virginia's death penalty to murder and treason. The measure failed by one vote.
Nov 12, 2018 15 tweets 5 min read
Welp, a politician said something awful about public hanging, and this is my lane so ... thread? (racist violence ahead)

nbcnews.com/politics/polit… Well into the 20th century, in Mississippi and the South, pubic hanging was how counties executed people. Hangings were often well-attended and festive events--you could expect to get nice and drunk and do some visiting. They were attended by white and Black people. (!)