Download or read book Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace written by Daniel A. Cohen and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Daniel A. Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.