They all love Jack

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Cornelia Hughes Dayton

Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions - including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution.

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Stewart P. Evans and Paul Gainey

The murder and mutilation of at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London in the fall of 1888 continues to fascinate students of true crime, largely because the perpetrator, Jack the Ripper, was never caught. The slayings have prompted dozens of books, and more than 100 identities for the killer have been suggested. The British authors?Evans is a police officer, Gainey a constabulary secretary?here argue that the killer was an American, a quack doctor named Francis Tumblety who at the time was suspected by Scotland Yard. Tumblety, a peddler of fake nostrums, had earlier been temporarily charged with complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. At the time of the Ripper murders, Tumblety, who was living in London and was out on bail for other charges, fled England and made his way back to the U.S., where he died in 1903. Evans and Gainey make a case as tenuous as most, theirs based on a contemporary letter written by the head of Scotland Yard's Special Branch, John Littlechild, who suspected Tumblety. Their book will interest only the most dedicated Ripperologists, who may also find merit in the grisly photos.

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Christi Phillips

London, 1672: A vicious killer stalks the court of Charles II, inscribing his victims' bodies with mysterious markings. Are these the random murders of a madman? The deadly consequence of a personal vendetta? Or the grisly result of a hidden conspiracy? Cambridge, 2008: A Trinity College history professor is found dead, the torn page of a seventeenth-century diary in his hand. His death appears to be an accident, but the college's newest Fellow Claire Donovan and historian Andrew Kent suspect otherwise ...

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Richard Howells

"Why does the story of the Titanic retain such a hold on the popular imagination, one hundred years after it sank on the night of 15 April 1912? Howells explores the myths around the Titanic legend, showing what they reveal about the culture of their time, as well as the role that myth still plays in our lives today"--