| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic. By Susan Branson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xii, 182 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4088-7.)
Have you heard of Ann Carson? How in 1815 she married another man while her first husband was at sea, and how the second husband fatally shot the first one when the drunkard sea captain unexpectedly returned? And how she was charged with masterminding a plot to extract a pardon for that second husband by kidnapping the governor of Pennsylvania? You probably have not, but you surely would have if you had lived in Philadelphia or any major U.S. city in the first decades of the nineteenth century. She was known as the "notorious" Mrs. Carson, though she preferred to call herself "celebrated."	1
Susan Branson has two challenges in writing this book. First, she needs to tell this extremely complicated tale, in which almost every element is open to question or qualification, in a coherent way. Second, she needs to make us understand why this particular domestic crime incurred such ferocious attention. Branson acquits herself superbly on both counts.	. . .

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