Dartmouth Events

Book Talk with Bruce Dorsey: Murder in a Mill Town
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 | 4 p.m. | Haldeman 041

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and Society of Fellows at Dartmouth.

Bruce Dorsey is Professor of History at Swarthmore College and writes about the history of gender, sexuality, religion, social movements, and popular culture in the United States. In addition to Murder in a Mill Town, he is the author of two books: Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Cornell University Press, 2002), winner of the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and Crosscurrents in American Culture, co-edited with Woody Register (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). In 2016 he was awarded the LGBT Religious History Award for an article published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

About Murder in a Mill Town
In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. Soon, news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker. 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.”

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.