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Full Description
A master storyteller presents a riveting drama of America's first "crime of the century"--from murder investigation to a church sex scandal to celebrity trial--and its aftermath.
In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first "trial of the century."
After her death--after she became the country's most notorious "factory girl"--Cornell's choices about work, survival, and personal freedom became enmeshed in stories that Americans told themselves about their new world of industry and women's labor and the power of religion in the early republic. Writers penned seduction tales, true-crime narratives, detective stories, political screeds, songs, poems, and melodramatic plays about the lurid scandal. As trial witnesses, ordinary people gave testimony that revealed rapidly changing times. As the controversy of Cornell's murder spread beyond the courtroom, the public eagerly devoured narratives of moral deviance, abortion, suicide, mobs, "fake news," and conspiracy politics. Long after the jury's verdict, the nation refused to let the scandal go.
A meticulously reconstructed historical whodunit, Murder in a Mill Town exposes the troublesome workings of criminal justice in the young democracy and the rise of a sensational popular culture.
Contents
Preface: Before the Curtain Rises
Act I Murder
1. The Haystack
2. The Manufacturer
3. A Troubled Marriage
4. Native Sons
5. "Useful in this World"
6. "Factory Girl"
7. "Crazy Dow"
8. A Methodist Family
9. Moving Planet
10. Circuit Rider
11. Slanderer
12. Moral Police
13. Examination
14. Manhunt
15. "If I am missing"
Act II Trial
16. Courtroom Tales
17. Physicians, Bodies, and Women
18. Doctor Visits
19. Sex Talk
20. Bad Stories
21. Passions and Self-Murder
22. "This most extraordinary of all cases"
Act III Scandal
23. Mobs and More Murders
24. Conspiracies
25. Vindication
26. Camp Meetings
27. Seduction
28. Fake News
29. Stage and Song
Coda
Notes
Index
