Product Description: After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was “cruel and unusual” for the offense charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual—and the last—ever to be executed for a crime of this sort...read more

Product Description: This innovative reappraisal of federal courts in Indian Territory shows how the United States Congress used judicial reform to suppress the Five Tribes’ governments and clear the way for Oklahoma statehood. Historians Jeffrey Burton traces the changing relationship between the federal government and the distinctive institutions of the Indian republics, from the post-Civil War Reconstruction treaties to the Enabling Act that carried Oklahoma to the threshold of statehood...read more