From the category archives:

Crimes and Criminals

And you are…who again?

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Who were the Guise?

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Blaming the Burke and Hare Victim

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By Lisa Rosner
Why, when a beautiful girl is murdered, are people so quick to assume that it must somehow have been her own fault?
That has been the unfortunate fate of Mary Paterson, killed by Burke and Hare in April 1828, her body sold to anatomy lecturer Dr. Robert Knox. As if it were not bad [...]

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Burke and Hare Anatomy Murders

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By Lisa Rosner
On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in the West Port district of Edinburgh, heard two men quarrelling from the floor below, and a woman’s strong voice calling “Murder.” The tenant downstairs was William Burke, a shoemaker; Alston may have guessed that the other man was Burke’s associate William [...]

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GRACE HAMMER by Sara Stockbridge – A Reader Review

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Reviewed by Audrey L. Vest
The Victorian Era in England at the height of the British Empire was a time of tremendous expansion. Public morals were strict, yet many Londoners lived in the grip of poverty and crime, especially prostitution. Charles Dickens depicted the harsh lot of the poor in his novels, populated with unforgettable characters. [...]

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Henry Hudson’s Lost Voyage

By Peter C. Mancall

On April 17, 1610, the English sea captain Henry Hudson maneuvered his small ship called Discovery out of St. Katherine’s dock in London toward the Northwest Passage, the water route Europeans believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On board were twenty-two men and two boys, one of whom was Hudson’s seventeen-year [...]

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Midwives and Witches

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by Bronwyn Backstrom (Vanderbilt University)
The ideas of witches and witchcraft have been around for centuries and were hot topics. Witches were typically identified as older single women of lower class. Throughout history, there has been a stereotype that only women, specifically midwives and other women-healers, were witches. Women were targets because of the tradition of [...]

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