This chapter traces the history of the world's anti-death penalty movement, noting how countries moved away from punishments such as breaking on the wheel and burning at the stake and how capital punishment has been abolished or curtailed in various countries and American states. After taking note of early successes of the abolitionist movement, the chapter discusses abolitionist efforts over time, including in the Progressive Era and in the post-World War II period (e.g., in Europe and the Americas). In particular, the chapter discusses American states (i.e., Michigan, Wisconsin and Rhode Island) that abolished capital punishment before the American Civil War, and describes how West Germany outlawed capital punishment in its constitution in 1949. The chapter discusses how international human rights law has evolved in the post-World War II period, with capital punishment coming under increased scrutiny and protocols to international and regional human rights conventions (e.g., the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Protocols 6 & 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights) abolishing or restricting the death penalty's use.

This essay revisits the moment of encounter between the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoags from a decolonizing perspective, situating this historical moment and the actions that followed in the indigenous space of Wȏpanȃak, or Dawnland, rather than the typologically rendered space made famous in accounts by William Bradford and other puritan authors. Drawing on recent insights of indigenous scholars such as Lisa Brooks, Margaret Bruchac, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, this essay maps out how local Native leaders like Massasoit, Samoset, and Philip drew English settlers into their protocols of diplomacy and shared responsibility for the land. The Wampanoags sustained the colony with their surplus agriculture and traditional ecological knowledge, without which none of the early English settlements could have survived. The English, however, were incapable of conceptualizing a relationship of reciprocity with America’s indigenous population, leading eventually to war and acts of genocide. This history, duly recorded from the settler-colonial perspective, has a parallel history that was recorded through the medium of wampum and survives through oral tradition. But to hear this alternative version, we must first learn to disentangle ourselves from the “desert wilderness” of colonial reporting.