The year was 1851 and the place was Hangtown, the California mining camp that today is known as Placerville. It was here that the unpredictable and entertaining story of Zach Johnson's search for gold takes place. Zach, the son of an Episcopal priest, was a gentle man who'd come to Hangtown from Virginia to get rich. What did he do that so many men wanted him dead?It was in Hangtown's El Dorado Hotel that Zach met Claire McCarthy, a feisty, independent beauty. Zach and Claire fell ...

At one time when an individual wanted a direct, personal experience of God that person turned to his or her dreams. The early third century Christian defender of the faith, Tertullian, observed, "Is it not known to all people that the dream is the most usual way that God reveals himself to man?" Yet by the eleventh century, King William II of England states, "They are not good Christians that regard dreams." Why did this reversal of opinion occur, not only in Christian thinking, but in Jew...

World War II veteran Hank Dunfield is about to turn one hundred years old. The staff at Ponderosa Pine Lodge have recruited Sarah, a young nursing student, to keep Hank safe, comfortable, and in the building while they plan a grand centenarian celebration. There’s one problem: Hank doesn’t want to live that long.Seemingly opposites, Hank and Sarah kindle a deep friendship. Sarah fears the future with multiple sclerosis will be even more isolated, difficult, and painful than the iso...

New Zealand has one of the highest levels of imprisonment in the Western world. Yet the growth of imprisonment in New Zealand has occurred when the crime rate here, as in most other Western societies, has been in significant decline. Why, then, the disjuncture?In this penetrating BWB Text, John Pratt describes the dramatic transformation in penal thought that has recently taken place in this country. Rising imprisonment in New Zealand, against the background of a falling crime rate...

Dive into some of the big issues facing New Zealand with this bundle of hard-hitting BWB Texts. These four works are combined into one easy-to-read e-book, available direct and DRM-free from our website or from international e-book retailers. Tracey Barnett’s The Quiet War on Asylum addresses a big question: Why would New Zealand, a country that has never had a boatload of asylum arrivals in modern history, suddenly legislate for mass detention? Jane Kelsey looks hard at the Trans Pacific ...

Expertly drawing on international examples and existing literature, Penal Populism closes a gap in the field of criminology. In this fascinating expose of current crime policy John Pratt examines the role played by penal populism on trends in contemporary penal policy.Penal populism is associated with the public's decline of deference to the criminal justice establishment amidst alarm that crime is out of control. Pratt argues that new media technology is helping to spread...

The Hangtown series is the story of Zach Johnson's search for his soul. Zach struggles with morals, religion, sex, and love. In book two, Zach confronts the repressive forces of the Nativist Party; endeavors to understand why God allows suffering; and is dumbfounded by a series of dreams his love, Claire McCarthy, has. The adventure unfolds in Hangtown, a 1852 California mining town.

1852 was an election year. At that time, Hangtown was a mining camp in California's mother lode. The Native American Party was popular there because it wanted to make the United States a white, Protestant nation. Opposing the Nativists was Zach Johnson, the owner of the local newspaper. Zach's editorials argued women, Negroes, Indians, and immigrants deserved the same legal rights as native-born men. The struggle for dominance between the Nativists and Zach was unrelenting, and at times, r...

Why do some modern societies punish their offenders differently to others? Why are some more punitive and others more tolerant in their approach to offending and how can these differences be explained? Based on extensive historical analysis and fieldwork in the penal systems of England, Australia and New Zealand on the one hand and Finland, Norway and Sweden on the other, this book seeks to answer these questions.The book argues that the penal differences that currently exist betwe...

This book traces the rise of contemporary populism in Western democracies, marked by the return of would-be 'strong men' politicians. It seeks to make sense of the nature, origins, and consequences of their ascendancy—as expressed, for example, in the startling rise of the social movement surrounding Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK and the remarkable spread of ideologies that express resistance to ‘facts,’ science, and expertise.Uniquely, the book shows how what began as a form o...

`A lucid and fascinating account of how society initially comes to be viewed as ′civilized′ on the basis of how it punishes its offenders, and the various numances and contradictions that form the backdrop to that ′civilization′ prior to 1970 and the unraveling of that process thereafter. ...He [Pratt] has at the very least broadened the boundaries of the debate about the history of imprisonment in new and novel ways that will surely become a basis for future analysis′ - The Howard Journal...

Canadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire.From 1867 to 1947, war or threat of war forced Canadians to define and redefine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in Continental Europe and beyond mobilized in support of imperial war efforts, their participation challenged the imagined ...