A review by marginaliant
Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins
5.0
"The skeptic might have pointed out that Shaw, as a member of Harvard's board of overseers, had a conflict of interest in this case, but that was not how the law worked in Boston, and particularly, not how the law worked at Harvard."
This isn't an analytical academic history, but it is a wonderfully constructed narrative history that gripped me from the get-go. Collins has done a wonderful job piecing together the story of the Parkman-Webster murder case from court records, newspaper clippings, diary entries, all very seamlessly. I had a hard time putting it down, every page was equal parts fascinating and consternating and demonstrates the complete omnipresence of "Harvard Men" in Cambridge and Boston at the time. I wish it had gone a bit further in teasing out some of the implications of the trial, what it does is very brief, but overall I had a great time and I'm going to be reading more of Collins' work in the future.
This isn't an analytical academic history, but it is a wonderfully constructed narrative history that gripped me from the get-go. Collins has done a wonderful job piecing together the story of the Parkman-Webster murder case from court records, newspaper clippings, diary entries, all very seamlessly. I had a hard time putting it down, every page was equal parts fascinating and consternating and demonstrates the complete omnipresence of "Harvard Men" in Cambridge and Boston at the time. I wish it had gone a bit further in teasing out some of the implications of the trial, what it does is very brief, but overall I had a great time and I'm going to be reading more of Collins' work in the future.