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• Randall Stephens, author of The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll, wrote at History Today about the influence of Pentecostal Christianity on rock ’n’ roll during its formative years.
• PopMatters chatted with Vera Tobin, author of Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, about unreliable narrators, showing versus telling, and the well-made surprise.
• An excerpt from Sarah E. Igo’s The Known Citizen, on late nineteenth-century Americans’ exclusive, patriarchal, and bourgeois conception of privacy, was published in Lapham’s Quarterly.
• At The Root, Tera Hunter, author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century, responded to recent statements by Kanye West by describing the tragic situations in which freed African Americans might choose to be re-enslaved rather than abandon their families.

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May 11: The American Tradition of Torture

In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water. Thirty…