As Gallows Hill is a topic not yet thoroughly researched by anyone, it is incredibly difficult to find secondary sources. This has made it impossible to pull directly from secondary works that discuss specific historiographic perspectives as they pertain to public executions. While I draw on Michel Foucault's work "Discipline and Punish" to address the postmodernist and Foucauldian historiographic perspective, I have no direct secondary sources that relate to cultural and oral history other than the Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society.

Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society (1960)

Oral history is a historiographic perspective vital to understanding Gallows Hill. In relation to Gallows Hill and the history of public execution in early America, oral history takes on a different meaning. Oral history ties itself closely to oral tradition and cultural history. To most people, Gallows Hill is a myth. It is known to some only because someone has mentioned the myth to them via word of mouth. However, as ghost stories are told and myths surrounding Gallows Hill are spread, so too is the history of Gallows Hill. By applying the historiographic perspective of oral history and oral tradition to this topic, Gallows Hill, one can better understand what Gallows Hill once was as well as what it is today.

Discipline and Punish

The Foucauldian historiographic perspective is named after its founder, Michel Foucault. The Foucauldian historiographic perspective, as it relates to public executions, aims to analyze the social context surrounding public punishment and the penal system, specifically examining how changes in power influence and alter punishment. In his famous work, Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the influence power has on punishment by analyzing the changes in punishment throughout history. In the "Body of the Condemned," the penal system began with public displays of punishment, carried out in the most grotesque ways imaginable at the whims of absolutist or sovereign powers like monarchies. Sovereign powers made punishment a public, theatrical ritual of torture so that everyone could witness the absolute power of the sovereign over the body as well as let everyone know what would happen to those who committed crimes against the monarchical power. Later on, as Foucault discusses in "Panopticism," a new form of power emerged as "the body as the major target of penal repression disappeared" (Foucault, 1995, p.8). While public torture was no longer the method, "for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict," disciplinary power was used. Foucault believes that throughout history power was the only thing that changed the penal system, not calls for humanitarian reform.

Foucault, Michel. “The Body of the Condemned.” Essay. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, 1–31. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society (1960)

A historiographic perspective that addresses culture seeks to understand how historical events influence groups of people. More importantly, the cultural approach to history examines cultural traditions and interpretations of historical events. A historiographic perspective concerning social history is quite similar. Regarding Gallows Hill and the early United States penal system, cultural history considers how these historical experiences played a role in the everyday lives of early citizens. Social history plays a role in understanding the historical significance of various systems and structures within a society. Social and cultural history also drawls on other disciplines like anthropology and sociology to better understand how systems such as the penal system influence the structures of our early societies. In "Public Executions in Pennsylvania," in the Journal of Lancaster County Historical Society (1960), the author uses cultural and social history to discuss and analyze the influence public executions had on the culture of the early United States.