Book Review

Lethal Imagination represents a new wave of American historical scholarship that is turning away from big outbreaks and massive uprisings to micro-level violence: homicide, the abuse of females and children, family violence, and, in general, violence at the grass roots. Notable in Lethal Imagination are the stories of obscure individuals that strikingly underscore many of the essays. In Ann M. Little's essay on wifely abuse of husbands in the New Haven colony there is the widow Francis Hitchcock, whose colorful language exposed the sometime weakness of masculine authority in the colony. Laura F. Edwards's piece on women and domestic violence in nineteenth-century North Carolina introduces us to the fighting spouses Cynthia and Richard Oliver. Mary E. Odem's study of rape victims in early-twentieth-century Alameda County, California, resurrects from historical anonymity the teenager Catherine Shultz, who was repeatedly violated by her father over many years. Of another race was the Louisiana freedwoman Martha Kemp—one of many African American females singled out in Uche Egemonye's study of assaults against black women in the South, 1865–1910. Lee Chambers-Schiller devotes an entire chapter to a revealing episode: the murder trial of nineteen-year-old Mary Harris, killer of Adoniram J. Burroughs, whose seduction, betrayal, and abandonment of her provoked the act that took a jury all of five minutes to exonerate with a not guilty verdict. Famous in 1908 but now forgotten until the essay in this volume by Paula K. Hinton is Belle Gunness of small-town Indiana, one of America's first female serial killers, who got away with murdering a succession of husbands because of society's reluctance to confront the notion of a deviant woman such as Gunness.

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