Hannah: The Condemned Child

In December 1786, a small Connecticut town gathered behind its meeting house to witness a hanging. The condemned was Hannah Ocuish, twelve years old.Told through the surviving record-especially the execution sermon printed on the day she died- Hannah: The Condemned Child traces the case from a summer morning on the road outside New London to the courtroom, the gaol, the pulpit, and the scaffold. It asks how fear hardens into certainty, how a child's words are filtered through adult authority, and how print can turn a girl into an "example" for generations to come.Written in a restrained, documentary style, this book explores: - what the sources claim-and what they leave out- childhood, culpability, and punishment in early America- poverty, placement, and the "management" of unwanted children- the making of moral theatre through sermons, courts, and crowdsContent note: this book discusses the killing of a child and the execution of a child.