Spring 2024 Courses

What can murder teach us about history? How can we understand high-profile murders from a historical perspective? In this course, we’ll examine several murder cases from the colonial period to the twentieth century in order to explore the major social, political, and cultural issues illuminated by the homicides and the resulting trials. Some of the cases covered will likely be familiar to you; others have lapsed into historical obscurity over the course of centuries. Each of them, however, was a “flashpoint” murder at its time—that is, a murder that took place during a period of social upheaval and that generated a great deal of public attention and controversy. In what sense can we understand these crimes and their prosecutions as a product of their times, and what can the crimes tell us about the values and attitudes of people in the past?