Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 12-1-2010
Journal / Book Title
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to examine the discourses that surrounded the life of Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley. The gaps in Czolgosz’s life, his peculiar silences, his poor health and the ambiguity and thinness of his confession, rather than taken as instances of mental and physical distress, have, instead, been understood as signs of a revolutionary anarchistic assassin. Czolgosz is an expression of a cultural tradition in somatic form. I argue that the discursive construction of criminality, already present in the late nineteenth century within the medical and human sciences, is what shaped Czolgosz’s life story.
DOI
DOI:10.4000/chs.1192
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Federman, Cary, "The Life of an Unknown Assassin: Leon Czolgosz and the Death of William McKinley" (2010). Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 16.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/justice-studies-facpubs/16
Published Citation
Federman, Cary. "The Life of an Unknown Assassin: Leon Czolgosz and the Death of William McKinley." Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 14, no. 2 (2010): 85-106.
Included in
Cognitive Psychology Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Health Psychology Commons, Immunology and Infectious Disease Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Psychology Commons, Political Theory Commons