Now you can load my Amazon.com bestselling book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America, onto your e-reader for only $0.99.

• Kindle: Amazon.com.
• Nook: Barnes and Noble
• All other formats: Smashwords.

This special promotion is available for only a limited time, so make sure to grab a copy before the price goes back up.

In this podcast, I talk about how I came up with the idea of writing my new book, Bound with an Iron Chain, and about my experience writing it.

Book Update

My book is slowly beginning to populate the various booksellers across the Web. Here is a list of websites from around the world where you can find my book.

In Paperback:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes and Noble
• Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom)
• Amazon.ca (Canada)

As an E-Book:

• Amazon.com – Kindle
• Barnes and Noble – Nook
• Smashwords – All e-book formats (including Kindle, Nook, Sony, etc.)
• Amazon.co.uk – Kindle (United Kingdom)
• Google Books (U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia)
• Also available in Apple iBooks

Within one week of being published, my new book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America, has appeared on Amazon.com’s Bestsellers lists for books about Colonial American History and English History!

If you enjoy reading about American history, English history, or crime history, then join the other people who have already bought Bound with an Iron Chain. It’s the perfect book to read on the beach or take with you on vacation this summer!

My book is available from Amazon.com as a Paperback ($16.99) and as a Kindle ($4.99). It is also available in all e-book formats at Smashwords.com ($4.99).

Some notable crime-related blog articles have appeared over the last week or so.

Ben Ruset of the NJPineBarrens has written a fascinating article on Captain John Bacon, a notorious outlaw who took advantage of the American Revolutionary War to commit robbery and burglary in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

ExecutedToday.com notes the execution of Thomas Bird–who in 1790 was the first person to be federally executed under the U.S. Constitution–by interviewing Jerry Genesio, author of Portland Neck: The Hanging of Thomas Bird.

Robert Wilhelm of MurderByGaslight.com recounts the gruesome murder of John Flanders in 1873.

April Moore of folsom’s 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison’s First and Only Executed Men has just completed a four-part series on the overpopulation of prisons, which can be found on the website’s blog. And DelanceyPlace.com has posted a related article called “The Monster Factory,” which questions the deterrent effect of today’s prisons with some eye-opening statistics.

I was recently in London and had the good fortune to interview and enjoy afternoon tea with Lucy Inglis, who is the author/publisher of Georgian London.

Lucy and I met on Monday, April 18 at Blacks in Soho, London, and we talked about eighteenth-century London, crime, and the perception of Americans by Londoners during this time. Lucy is currently finishing up a book about Georgian London, so she also gave a sneak preview of what we will learn from the book when it is published by Penguin in the spring of 2012.

Click on the audio link associated with this post to hear my interview with Lucy, and then don’t forget to visit her website at www.georgianlondon.com.

Robert Wilhelm, the author and publisher of the excellent Murder by Gaslight blog has just launched a new website called The National Night Stick.

Readers of crime on the Web have come to expect engaging tales of 19th-century murder and mayhem on Murder by Gaslight, and The National Night Stick promises to follow in this same tradition with illustrated stories of “Crime, Eccentricity and the Sporting Life in 19th-Century America.”

I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Wilhelm about his new project for Early American Crime.

EAC: Tell us about your new website and how you came up with the idea for it.

While researching 19th-century murders, I came across non-murder stories of people and events that were, to me, incredibly fascinating. Like Steve Brodie, who may or may not have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886 and who then created a character for himself that he played, on stage and off, for the rest of his life. Or the Crush Collision where 50,000 people gathered in a field in Texas in 1896 to watch two locomotives collide at full speed.

I was also looking for ways to deliver information beyond the standard blog format. I decided to put the two together and create a mythical 19th-century scandal sheet called The National Night Stick.

EAC: You say on your new website that it is modeled after The National Police Gazette. Can you tell us about that publication and about how your website follows in the tradition of that serial publication?

The National Police Gazette was the first nationally distributed men’s magazine in America. It began publishing in the 1840’s and lasted well into the twentieth century. During its heyday in the 1880’s and 1890’s, it printed stories of crime, sexual scandal, and general sensationalism—all told in short concise prose and accompanied by lavish illustrations. That is the content and style that the National Night Stick will attempt to emulate.

One recurring feature in the Police Gazette was “Lives of the Felons,” which told stories about individual criminals. With a nod to this feature, The National Night Stick has “Rogue’s Corner” with criminal portraits and biographies form Inspector Thomas Byrnes’s 1886 book Professional Criminals of America.

EAC: You also write Murder by Gaslight. How did you decide to start writing blogs, and why are you starting another one?

I began Murder by Gaslight after researching the stories behind American murder ballads. Though some American ballads have roots in the British Isles, most were written about actual American murders. What I found was an abundance of source material about American murders in general. True crime has always been popular here in America, and in the 19th century, as now, murder trials were a source of entertainment.

I thought it would be good to have all the information I found in one place. The result is Murder by Gaslight, which has been well received. I think the appeal, both then and now, is not the gruesome nature of the crimes—and some were quite gruesome—but the fact that there is always a good story before and after the crime itself.

I decided to start another blog because not all crimes are murders.

EAC: How did you become interested in nineteenth-century American crime?

It was a natural regression from murder ballads to society murders to serial killers to con-men, prostitutes, pimps and pickpockets.

EAC: The National Night Stick currently advertises that a work of serialized fiction will be appearing soon on its pages. Can you give us a preview of what The Confessions of Jonathan Pratt is about?

Most magazines and many newspapers in the 19th-century published serialized fiction, so I thought it would be a good feature to add to The National Night Stick. The Confessions of Jonathan Pratt will be a strange, and hopefully humorous, story set in a historical context and told in brief but frequent posts.

The story is set in New York State during the 1840’s, because that was a time and place dominated by weird and extreme religious, political, and social movements, with a constant undercurrent of violence. We follow an innocent farm boy from New England who enters this volatile world, meets some characters who would be memorable in any era, and gets deeper and deeper into trouble. Think Candide meets Deadwood in antebellum New York.

Look for The Confessions of Jonathan Pratt in late spring 2011.

If you have not noticed already, Early American Crime is now available as a podcast.

Beginning with “Early American Criminals: Thomas Mount and the Flash Company,” you can enjoy the tales of America’s earliest criminals by listening, reading, or both. Simply click on the “Play” button of the media player at the beginning of the posts.

You can also subscribe to the podcasts:

Click here to subscribe to the Early American Crime podcasts via iTunes.

Click here to subscribe to the Early American Crime podcasts through a podcast reader.

I hope this new feature enhances your enjoyment of learning about the criminal underworld of colonial America and the early United States.

J. L. Bell, who writes the Boston 1775 blog, recently wrote a series of posts that breaks down the recent ruling by the Supreme Court on whether a life sentence for a seventeen-year-old convicted of two armed robberies–or for any juvenile offender who hasn’t committed murder–constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In his dissenting opinion on the case, Clarence Thomas contends that the Court should look to sentencing practices at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted for guidance. He claims that since capital punishment could be imposed on people as young as seven years old under British common law in the 18th century, the punishment of the juvenile in question would almost certainly have been deemed acceptable back then and therefore should be deemed acceptable now. Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito both signed on to Thomas’s dissent.

Bell then asks the obvious question: Did the British justice system of the 1700s actually execute young children?

Bell discovers that actual examples of such punishments are exceedingly rare. He finds one case in 1748 where a ten-year-old boy, William York, was accused of killing a five-year-old girl named Susan Mayhew. They both lived in the workhouse at Eyke in England. Even though York was convicted of the crime and was sentenced to execution, the judges kept ordering delays until he reached the age of eighteen or nineteen, when he received a royal pardon and was placed in the Royal Navy.

Bell finds a few cases where children were executed in America, but the details of these cases are certain to give even Justice Thomas some cause for pause.

Here are the links to the complete series in order:

1. “The Moral Commitment Embodied in the Eighth Amendment”
   
2. “Unusual and Excessive Rigour on the Part of the Magistrates”?
3. William York: ten-year-old murderer
4. The Youngest Americans to Be Executed

I was recently interviewed by Leonard Sipes about “Early American Crime in the Media” for D.C. Public Safety Radio, which presents audio programs on crime, criminal offenders, and the criminal justice system.

The program lasts a half hour and covers the criminal justice system in colonial America, how crime was covered in early American newspapers, and the politicization of crime in the eighteenth century.

Listen to the interview by clicking here or by going to the D.C. Public Safety Radio site.

D.C. Public Safety Radio is sponsored by The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, a federal executive branch entity providing parole, probation and reentry services to Washington D.C.

Read my article on Anthony Lamb, who was perhaps America’s most successful transported convict, in February’s issue of The Readex Report: “‘Human Serpents sent us by our Mother Country’: The Transformation of Anthony Lamb, Transported Convict.”

J. L. Bell posted a follow-up to my recent article about the burglar William Linsey on his Boston 1775 blog: “‘This Day is to be Executed in Worcester . . .’” I highly recommend it.