The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race

Antebellum culture is spectacularly exposed in this book of horrific multiple murder and madness in Upstate New York. Andrew W. Arpey offers insight into subjects that will have broad appeal to historians and scholars of law, journalism, religion, psychiatry, politics, race, and reform. Drawing on newspapers, trial accounts, and private papers, Arpey shows the political machinations surrounding the case and the heated debate the trial set off over the relationship of race and crime, the use...