Murder Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation

A conversation with historian Bruce Dorsey about Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation

February 7, 2024 • by Claire Potter

I asked Bruce Dorsey, author of Murder in a Mill Town, to come talk to me about America’s first, great sensational trial....

Politics

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics

October 4, 2022 • by Ed Pavlić

On the third Sunday after the march, September 15, 1963, six Black children were killed in three separate incidents—one of which was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—in Birmingham. That day marked the end of Baldwin’s brief career as a literary celebrity and the beginning of his radicalization, ...

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

Race

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

At last, a policeman is held accountable for murdering a Black American. But the process of imagining an end to lethal policing has only begun

April 21, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ My greatest fear as I waited for the verdict in the George Floyd case yesterday was not that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin wasn’t going to be convicted of something. The prosecution had carefully left two back doors open for the jury, alternative charges that would have allowed the ...

History

We Lionize Abraham Lincoln – But John Wilkes Booth Still Embodies a Part of America’s Soul

How the insurrection on January 6th brought a legendary assassin back to life

March 18, 2021 • by Bennett Parten

"But if January 6 should tell us anything, it’s that his cause is far from lost. Like Lincoln, the ghost of John Wilkes Booth still haunts us from the grave." - Bennett Parten ...

Murder

Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation

A conversation with historian Bruce Dorsey about Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

At last, a policeman is held accountable for murdering a Black American. But the process of imagining an end to lethal policing has only begun

We Lionize Abraham Lincoln – But John Wilkes Booth Still Embodies a Part of America’s Soul

How the insurrection on January 6th brought a legendary assassin back to life

Newsletter

Connect With Us