Room 108

In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal. In Murder in a Mill Town, Bruce Dorsey, professor of history at Swarthmore College, presents a riveting drama of America's first "crime of the century.”

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 Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Cornell University Press), winner of the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and the co-editor of Crosscurrents in American Culture (Houghton Mifflin).

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