The Trial Of Emma Cunningham

 The alleged 1857 murder of a wealthy Bond Street dentist by Emma Cunningham, a mature widow he was believed to be sexually involved with, served to distract many New Yorkers from the deepening national crisis over slavery in the United States. Public anxieties seemed well founded--domestic murders committed by women were believed to be increasing sharply, jeopardizing society's patriarchal structure. The penny press created public demand for a swift solution. The inadequacy of the city police, complicated by the state's decision to install a new force, resulted in the rival forces battling it out on the streets. Elected coroners conducting inquests, and elected D.A.s prosecuting alleged culprits, fed a tendency to rush to judgment. New York juries, all men, were reluctant to send a middle class woman to the gallows. At trial, Cunningham proved a formidable and imaginative member of the so-called weaker sex and was acquitted. This reexamination places the story in its social and political context.

The neglected histories of 19th-century NYC’s maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit them Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson’s peculiar and complicated biography. Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these “witches.” Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks’s mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doesticks made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren’t as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoying the entertainment and attention. Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.

In 1857 Dr. Harvey Burdell, a young dentist, was murdered; his lover, Emma Hempstead Cunningham, a widow with five children, was accused of his brutal murder. Feldman presents a well-researched book that explores the gender politics and legal aspects of the dentist's murder and Emma Cunningham's trial.

David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla have gathered a colorful collection of essays exploring sensationalism in nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. The contributors analyze the role of sensationalism and tell the story of both the rise of the penny press in the 1830s and the careers of specific editors and reporters dedicated to this particular journalistic style. Divided into four sections, the first, titled "The Many Faces of Sensationalism," provides an eloquent defense of yellow journalism, analyzes the place of sensational pictures, and provides a detailed examination of the changes in reporting over a twenty-year span. The second part, "Mudslinging, Muckraking, Scandals, and Yellow Journalism," focuses on sensationalism and the American presidency as well as why journalistic muckraking came to fruition in the Progressive Era. The third section, "Murder, Mayhem, Stunts, Hoaxes, and Disasters," features a groundbreaking discussion of the place of religion and death in nineteenth-century newspapers. The final section explains the connection between sensationalism and hatred. This is a must-read book for any historian, journalist, or person interested in American culture.

Several encyclopedias overview the contemporary system of criminal justice in America, but full understanding of current social problems and contemporary strategies to deal with them can come only with clear appreciation of the historical underpinnings of those problems. Thus, this five-volume work surveys the history and philosophy of crime, punishment, and criminal justice institutions in America from colonial times to the present. It covers the whole of the criminal justice system, from crimes, law enforcement and policing, to courts, corrections and human services. Among other things, this encyclopedia: explicates philosophical foundations underpinning our system of justice; charts changing patterns in criminal activity and subsequent effects on legal responses; identifies major periods in the development of our system of criminal justice; and explores in the first four volumes - supplemented by a fifth volume containing annotated primary documents - evolving debates and conflicts on how best to address issues of crime and punishment. Its signed entries in the first four volumes--supplemented by a fifth volume containing annotated primary documents--provide the historical context for students to better understand contemporary criminological debates and the contemporary shape of the U.S. system of law and justice.

You couldn't make it up: incredible real-life criminal cases A fascinating A-Z of murderous crimes which spans the globe and the centuries in uncovering the extremes of human criminality in all its strangeness. This collection of unusual, if not sensational, murder cases recalls strange crimes of the past and offers insights into particularly macabre and shocking modern murders. Many of the cases also shed light on advances in crime detection, law enforcement and forensic science. Cases include: Krystian Bala, the Polish writer who killed a rival, and then used the murder as the plot for a novel; Alexander Pichuskin, who was stopped one short of killing the 64 victims he needed to 'fill a chess board'; John Lee, 'the man they could not hang' who survived three attempts to execute him; and Adelaide Bartlett, who was accused of killing her husband with chloroform, but was acquitted because no one could work out how she had done it - and she wouldn't say.