Preindustrial cities staged punishments as popular public spectacles in their busiest sectors

Evidence

To a modern human, the most distasteful of the preindustrial city’s public activities would perhaps be the punishments and executions. The stocks, the pillory, and the whipping post were all standard urban features. Most often located in the city’s busiest sector, their associated activities were expected to attract an appreciative audience. Colonial Boston had three well-patronized whipping posts, and whipping was one of the more popular spectator sports in America at the time (Miller, 1966:256). — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 179

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the reader’s interest in how public space organizes bodies and categories of people — the scaffold for Foucault’s punitive spectacle and for how urban order performs its authority. — connects to: Urban spectacle serves as a political weapon for both control and revolt. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 551; Urbanization drove executions out of public view into prisons — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1663
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — public punishment as community-stabilizing ritual theater in the city square.