| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers, editors. Murder on Trial: 1620–2002. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 279. Cloth $78.50, paper $24.95.
Histories of murder come in two grand types. Popular histories sensationalize, never missing a gory detail or failing to underscore the ways human passions run amuck. Academic histories, meanwhile, reject an assumption that murder is a species of phenomenological fact and treat it as a product of culture and power. The book under review, with its stark title and cover dominated by a large hangman's noose, seems at first glance to be a popular history, but it is in fact academic.	1
Editors Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers have contributed a lengthy introductory essay and then arranged the collected essays under three rubrics: "Race," "Mental Competency," and "Gender and Class Norms." Two-thirds of the essays concern murder cases in New England, but while this regional concentration narrows the volume to some extent, the lengthy span of the cases alleviates concerns regarding an unduly restricted focus. The essays address murder cases from the Plymouth Colony in the early 1600s to contemporary appeals to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, with many stops in between.	. . .

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