In this episode Kate is joined by historian Dr. Bruce Dorsey. Bruce is a professor of history at Swarthmore College. In 2002, he published his first book, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City, and he is also the co-editor of the book Crosscurrents in American Culture. His new book is called Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation. In it, Bruce tells the story of the death of factory worker Sarah Cornell, the trial of the Methodist preacher who was accused of her murder, and the public frenzy over the trial and its aftermath. I was thrilled to have the chance to talk with Bruce about how a historian tackles true crime, and our conversation covers how this book originated in a college course, as well as the challenge of weaving historical analysis a gripping drama.
IN THIS EPISODE
Note: Links to books are affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you purchase books through these links, I’ll make a small commission, which helps me keep Drafting the Past going. Thanks for supporting our guests and the podcast!
- Bruce’s new book, Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation
- David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
- Colson Whitehead
- Saidiya Hartman
- Toni Morrison
- Tiya Miles
- James Goodman
- Martha Hodes
- Bryant Simon
- John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale
TRANSCRIPT
Kate Carpenter:
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I’m your host, Kate Carpenter. In this episode, I’m joined by historian Dr. Bruce Dorsey.
Bruce Dorsey:
It’s wonderful to be here, Kate
Kate Carpenter:
Bruce is a professor of history at Swarthmore College. In 2002, he published his first book, Reforming Men And Women: Gender In The Antebellum City. He’s also the co-editor of the book, Crosscurrents in American Culture, and his new book is called Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation. In it, Bruce tells the story of the death of factory worker Sarah Cornell, the trial of the Methodist preacher who was accused of her murder and the public frenzy over the trial and its aftermath. I was thrilled to have the chance to talk with Bruce about how a historian tackles true crime and our conversation covers how this book originated in a college course, as well as the challenge of weaving historical analysis in a gripping drama. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Bruce Dorsey.
Bruce Dorsey:
Well, I was trained as an historian, completed a dissertation, a PhD in history, and my first book was based upon that dissertation. But I always cared deeply about the writing of history, even if I knew that I had to also be engaged in the scholarly arguments of history. And I was fortunate that I got a review of my dissertation manuscript when I was thinking about publication that I didn’t like necessarily, and I just said, I’m going to take this opportunity to start with a different vision of what that book could be. And I wrote the first book with that in mind already thinking about how is this going to be a way of structuring this book that won’t be like an academic paper or a scholarly argument?
And I transitioned from there to a career at a teaching intensive college. I teach at Swarthmore College, so I’ve spent a lot of time teaching, writing, talking about engaging in that. And so that’s been a part of how my writing has evolved, that I’ve been thinking more and more about the audiences that I can write for in trying to expand that to be as broad as possible. And this book, Murder in a Mill Town is the first of what I hope will be many books that tell the complex story of the past for broad audiences of readers interested in the stories of the past, but are interested as well in what those stories mean both then and now.
Kate Carpenter:
I know that for professors at primarily teaching colleges, finding time to write can be an ongoing challenge. When and where do you do your writing? How do you fit that into your routine?
Bruce Dorsey:
Where? The greatest amount of my writing takes place in my home office sitting in a comfortable ergonomic office chair with an extra wide desk, a super wide monitors. I like to be able to see all my documents, my notes, my new paragraphs all at once, and I envy those people who can write in a noisy cafe on trains and buses. That doesn’t work for me, but the time of day that I write doesn’t really matter. I used to be a that night owl. I’ve been training myself recently to be someone who can get up and work in the early hours of the day as well. And I found that for me, there’s no difference in the clarity of my mind or my productivity in completing pros, whether I’m writing at 9:00 AM or one or two in the morning, it’s just as productive for me. But the one exception to this preference to writing at my home office is I love to take what I call self-created writing retreats.
I especially like to go to locations where my stories take place and not just visit them but write when I’m there. And I decided for Murder in a Mill Town that I wanted to be in the same place and time, the exact same season when the murder trial happens. And this is the first week of May in Newport, Rhode Island. I went there not only to walk the spaces of it, but to write what I’d seen and the opening part of Act 2 of the book called The Trial. I take readers on a walk that’s similar to what the Reverend Avery took when the first day of the trial when he’s led by a jailer out of his incredibly dark prison cell where there’s hardly a light to be seen. And he’s struck by the bright sunlight that’s illuminating the sky, and he walks out of the town jail. It’s now a bed and breakfast in Rhode Island. He looks out across the street and there is the white [inaudible 00:04:50] of the Methodist meeting house across the street from the jail.
It says something about what this upstart sect was about, that it couldn’t afford a property other than right next to the town jail. And then I take my readers up the street, he passes the militia commons, the oldest tavern in America that’s still there. He turns at a street called Farewell Street, an ominous street name to walk by. He doesn’t see the sign I see at that moment, or the dry cleaner at that corner has a sign that says Grime doesn’t pay, but he makes his way towards the old state house that’s there. He walks under the spot where the Declaration of Independence has been read and he enters a courthouse where every eye of a pack, no space to be found there. Everyone’s eyes is are on him. And to do that, I needed to be there to write it, to feel it, to see what the sights and sounds and smells were at that location. So I’ve tried to do that in other places.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to get to all of that about how you craft this. I want to ask a couple nosy questions first about your process. Are there tools that you use to organize and to write?
Bruce Dorsey:
I don’t use the newest citation or nowhere on note-taking software. I don’t use any tool other than a word processor. I’ve become pretty swift and complete and accurate in creating bibliographies. I tend to keyword tag all of my notes that I’m taking so that I can search them and then process them, organize them and such. And I know that’s what exists for some software to do it. I just want to just get to it. And for me that’s work the best for me in terms of organizing and managing sources.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you organize your sources then? Do you have them in folders?
Bruce Dorsey:
Yes, I have them in folders, but they move at times. As the problem emerges, they get multiplied into the … Or notes get moved into the particular sort of question that I want to be writing about and answering. And so I’ll keep the master files of the notes and then I’ll move notes as well into files that are around questions, problems, issues.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing I always like to ask is where in the research process do you start writing?
Bruce Dorsey:
Not early enough, I always say. I’m better at giving that advice to writing friends and to students that you need to write as early as possible. I’m getting better with every year and every new idea and new project that I’m on, but I need a certain measure of immersion in a project. Some sense that I’ve exhausted the possibility of research before I begin the shift in my thinking from finding solutions, solving problems to crafting story, and how do I communicate that in a particular way. And then I want to start. And then I always say to myself, I wish I’d started earlier.
Kate Carpenter:
What does revision look like for you?
Bruce Dorsey:
Well, one of the things I like to do in my writing routine is that the start of every writing day, I rewrite what I wrote the day before. I know there are people who like to get new prose right on the page. For me, I find certain satisfaction in knowing that when I start the new writing that what I had just previously finished is some kind of second draft at that point in time. So that’s the first stage in it. So that’s part of my revision is constant and ongoing, but I’m willing to reconsider, reframe a scene or a chapter. I’ve done that in many instances in which I’ve written things. And it’s not a matter of just fine-tuning, but questioning, is this the best approach to it? And that includes where something comes into the story, how deeply I tell the story, how much I weave the history within the story. I’m constantly thinking through those questions.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, you mentioned your first book and you hinted that you see this book as the first in many books written for a broader audience. Talk to me about the difference between writing these two books.
Bruce Dorsey:
I’m not sure that the writing itself is entirely different, but some differences were quite intentional on my part. Some of them were a product of the good fortune of once I got involved in it. But I made certain kind of conscious decisions about what kind of story this was going to be, what approach I was going to take, how experimental I would be at certain moments in time. There are a multiplicity of voices in a case like this, a trial that was at the time, the longest trial in US history at the date that it happens, most murder cases, even capital crimes, the trial lasts a day or two at most. And in this case, this trial lasts a month, 30 days. It takes them nearly three days to select a jury as they go through 108 possible jurors before they can come up with 12.
It exhausts the spectators, the lawyers, the judges, the newsmen who were writing about it at that time. So there’s so many characters to be sort of thinking through that I had to be imagining how I was going to try to approach this to tell this story. But a key part of it is it’s a story about storytelling. Trials by their very essence are places where stories get told. Stories that not every storyteller has control over. Every lawyer, prosecutor or defense attorney thinks that they control the narrative that takes place in a trial, but every moment they call a witness to the stand, that story can slip from them. That can happen. And what’s really fascinating to me about the trial is the way that the individuals who come as witnesses, they’ve been telling those stories to the audiences and communities in different forms. They told stories to their neighbors. They told stories at coffee houses and important to me, they often told stories to fellow religious believers in places that might be prayer meetings and religious gatherings.
And they combine together storytelling that sometimes sounds like gossip, sometimes like rumors, but other times it sounds like religious confession. And I wanted to get a feel for how does that shape the way in which people in that moment have to decide an important issue about was this a murder or not? And was this evangelical preacher, the murderer of a young factory worker? But how were they able to sort of know that based on the stories that they’re hearing and telling? So for this book, that was an intentional part of something that I could not accomplish in the traditions of monograph form. But once I had a clear vision of what this final book would be about, I acquired an amazing agent. She confirmed the best instincts about the story, offered guidance for other approaches. We were fortunate to sell the book to a press the Oxford University press where I worked with an extraordinary hands-on editor. And I know that’s not always the case. So that made for a different kind of experience.
Kate Carpenter:
So I mentioned to you ahead of this conversation that I’ve been eager to talk to someone who has written a sort of true crime history book because I’m fascinated always by these books. And one thing that I always want to know is how you came upon this story. Did you just find it in the archive or was it something that you knew about?
Bruce Dorsey:
Well, I knew a little about it. My dissertation advisor had written an article about this story, but I had the fortunate opportunity that professor in graduate school asked me to get in at the early stages of designing a course about this as well. So those are the places that I’ve first heard about the case, but I didn’t start with the idea that I wanted to write a book that’s a historical who’d done it, but the story of Maria Cornell’s death, the extraordinary trial of an evangelical preacher and all the sources surrounding me, led me into a kind of true crime approach to this story. And I think the case is fascinating because not only is there a scandalous crime that takes place and a scandal after the trial as well, but it’s one of the earliest examples for the production of true crime writing itself.
The case itself produced what might be the first book we might say in the US that was a kind of true-crime story, something that blended and shifted back and forth between what looked like journalism and what looked like fictional accounts. And you can’t always tell the difference. And then it also produced a pamphlet a decade before Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story of Fall River Lawman goes on a manhood for the Reverend Avery when he escapes and goes into hiding to elude an arrest warrant. And he pens what I clearly see as a precursor, one of the earliest detective stories, and I’ll leave it to the readers to find out more about this man hunt and this character named Harvey Hardin who seeks him down. But I couldn’t avoid the true crime part of this story because it is the way in which the contemporaries at the moment experienced it and then it transitions beyond that.
But even more than that, I discovered early along as I was working on this, just as other scholars have that violent crimes are rich sources for the historian. Murders in particular lend themselves well to the writing of history because homicides tend to expose the frayed relationships that might happen at some point. People tend to murder people they know, not strangers, they murder people they have conflicts with in whatever form they have. And that trials like this also provide one of the rare opportunities for ordinary people’s voices to be heard in real time in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be. They’re asked, in this case, 250 of them brought forward to tell particular stories. And so they unmask the intimate social relationships they’ve gone awry, they expose the ugliness, the strained lines among families and friends and coworkers. And so as a result, it’s a kind of an attractive type of historical episodes to look at.
Kate Carpenter:
Genres like mystery and legal thriller and true crime have sort of typical beats that readers expect them to hit, but real life does not always match those beats. And then on top of that, for the historian, the archive does not always provide information to fill all those beats. Did you run into those sort of gaps and how did you deal with that?
Bruce Dorsey:
I certainly do. This is a case with an enormous amount of source material, and it’s because part of the story is that there’s an explosion in media that’s happening at the moment that the case happens and that it sets off an even more important kind of revolution in print media that happens at that moment in time. But that doesn’t mean that I knew all of the places and happened. So let’s take the case of this evangelical preacher from Avery. There is almost no records of anything he says or speaks or writes except for one place where he tries to defend the story of what his relationship with this woman Maria Cornell. And that ends up being more about his trying to defend it as a man of God, as a man of the cloth. Then really a true story about this.
So it was hard to reconstruct the life of a person who left behind almost no records, but I knew that he was part of, just as Maria Cornell was this community of Methodists for whom talking about their lives and storytelling was a crucial part of their existence. They built a community around about talking about their life stories, the way in which they had reached an awareness of the abyss of their sinfulness and the transformation that happened the way they were able to by their own means to embrace a new kind of democratic theology that they might say. So I could draw upon what oftentimes called parallel stories, the sources and voices that might happen otherwise. I’m fortunate that there are in this true-crime book that I alluded to, Catherine Williams’ account of the murder.
There are a collection of letters by Maria Cornell. They don’t exist in any other form. There’s no originals that I know for sure. I’m not sure to what extent they may have been edited or changed by Catherine Williams, but I also drew upon the diaries and letters of fellow Methodists, so the stories and writings that they said in their journals and their letters to friends and families who sound and had certain experiences that were identical to Maria Cornell’s and they become the way in which I can recreate her thinking, her voice based on the community of people she called sisters. It was a family of a faith community, and so I was able to build those parts of the story.
Kate Carpenter:
Let’s pause here to take a closer look at one passage from the book so that we can talk more about Bruce’s approach to storytelling and narrative structure. Murder in a Mill Town is arranged a bit like a play with three acts framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Here’s Dr. Bruce Dorsey reading from Act 1 murder and scene one, the haystack from Murder in a Mill Town.
Bruce Dorsey:
Stepping out of his farmhouse, John Durfee noticed a chill had set in. The earth crackled under each step of his boots. It was the first day of winter, December 21st, 1832, a Friday. The previous day had been a seasonably pleasant autumn afternoon with clear skies and a full moon rising early in the evening, but overnight, the temperatures had dropped to nearly 20 degrees and a steady wind blew from the west. Durfee’s farm lay along the main road in the sleepy village of Tiverton Rhode Island, where Durfee and his neighbors made the most of farming small plots of coastal land. They toiled for generations, supplementing their modest income by fishing and by exchanging paid labor with one another. Tiverton sat a quarter mile south of the Massachusetts state line across that line stood the bustling textile manufacturing town of Fall River. Durfee walked to the barn, pitched up with his team of horses and set off downhill toward the Taunton River.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. He got no farther than a few hundred yards when he saw you, a woman’s body hanging from a fence post inside his haystack yard, approaching the figure, uncertain if she were dead or alive. He parted the hair that had fallen in front of her face. One look must have sent a shiver through the farmer’s already cold body, a rope stretched six inches above the woman’s neck securing her rigid form to the stake. No longer was it a typical winter morning. Glimpsing two men within view, he shouted out to them. While the farmer waited, he observed that the woman wore a collage, a bonnet in the shape of a pleated hood, and her cloak was fully fastened down the length of her torso except for one hook opened at her breast. Her arms rested awkwardly underneath. Her shoes had been removed and set aside to her right. Her body hung with her knees bent at a right angle, her toes resting on the ground. Within moments, Durfee’s two neighbors arrived along with his elderly father Richard, who had heard his son’s cry’s from the farmhouse door.
The four men gazed at the woman for a moment, examining just how she was hanging. Then John Durfee climbed over the fence into the stack yard and tried to hoist her body so that he could slip the rope off the top of the pole, unable to lift the body with one arm and slipped the rope off with the other. He heard his father’s impatient holler, “Cut her down,” handed a knife, Durfee cut the rope near the top of the stake and laid the body on the ground. Then he ran to get the coroner. News spread quickly within minutes, a young constable from Fall River named Seth Darling arrived along with a crowd of onlookers. Darling surveyed the grass surrounding the stack yard and observed and others agreed that there appeared to be no evidence of a struggle. No one in this small crowd knew the young woman. She must surely be Darling thought one of fall reverse factory girls as workers in the textile mills were commonly called. A young woman’s violent death, no matter the cause signaled trouble for a factory town.
Kate Carpenter:
This is obviously an arresting opening. Was this always where you planned to start the story?
Bruce Dorsey:
I looked back when I knew you were going to ask this question to think about it. Yes, I knew there was a sense that that had to begin with this part of it. For everyone, the discovery of this body was a crucial part of this, but I can talk more about, it’s not really the beginning of the book and maybe I’ll hold that off for a moment entirely. That part. What was the beginning of the book? I’ve wrestled with many different ways, but in terms of starting the story, the first act, this is what I began with.
Kate Carpenter:
What goes into writing a scene like this? You take what I assume are relatively dry archival sources and really bring them to life on the page.
Bruce Dorsey:
I think that’s true. And I just love this line of questioning, thinking about what am I trying to accomplish in this opening? And I think first and foremost, I wanted readers to want to keep reading. I want them to move, want to go from one sentence or paragraph to the next, from one scene to the next. That’s the goal there. But there’s a mystery to the actual story itself. And it was important for me to set that, to give and maintain a sense of the suspense and mystery even as I’m bringing readers into the history of this particular place in time. And I want to say something authoritative about that history. There’s an uncertainty that I’m hoping I’m evoking in this as people are looking at something and not sure what they’re saying. And so I needed to introduce details that would be crucial for what contemporaries at that time, including jurors and spectators at Avery’s trial as well as my readers today are going to have to decide did a murder take place or are we willing to believe what the defense counterargument is that it was a suicide?
And I wanted to convey why does this mill town immediately care so much about a young woman who had only lived and worked in that particular factory town for less than three months. She for 10 years works in cotton mill factories across New England, but he or she’d only been there for under three months. And there’s something scandalous about an unmarried pregnant woman, factory worker dying a graphic public death in a discovery scene. And that’s important for me to convoke, but it’s also important for me to give a sense that to this community, the threat her death poses is something larger. It’s to the promise that they had made to farm families all over New England, just like other mill towns did. That they’ll provide a safe and moral place where you can trust to let your daughters become the leading edge of a new workforce, the women in taking on the principal role in the wage labor force of the beginning of industrial capitalism in America. And that’s what’s at threat, the whole livelihood of community.
And then finally, we get a chance to introduce ourselves to some characters that I think are important. John Durfee will return many times in this particular case, but I think it’s … I don’t hit it over the head, but I see here a story of a 34-year-old farmer who’s still living on the farm farm that his elderly father owns, that he can’t inherit until his father dies, that he has no status as a member of this community. He can’t even serve on the inquest jury to determine whether they decide whether this is a homicide or a suicide. And you can hear the sort of conflict when the father yells out for him to cut it down as if he’s in control of the situation.
But readers also have to know in some ways that readers will soon learn, I should say that the coroner’s jury believed that Cornell died by suicide, that John Durfee buries Cornell and his family’s graveyard only discover later that afternoon when going through her personal belongings that she left behind a hastily scribbled note the day of her death that read, “If I am missing, inquire of the Reverend, Mr. Avery of Bristol, you’ll know where I am.” And this sets off the quest to determine what is really the preacher’s involvement in this, and is it a murder?
Kate Carpenter:
What a gift That note is both of course, for the trial itself, but to you as the historian and the writer because I mean, it feels almost unreal. It’s so dramatic that you’ll know what happened to me. You hinted at the structure of the book, which you’ve set up much like a play. You also sort of frame it with this play that was written about the events. And so we have three structures and also an opening and an ending. How did you think about that?
Bruce Dorsey:
I tried to make the story unfold like a play. It’s prose like history, but there are extended moments where the dialogue seems more like a play. A trial has the tendency to move in that direction. I take the moments where I reconstruct the questioning, the cross-examining way in which you’re sort of brought into that moment. But it also gave me a way to think about the fact that plays and popular culture are crucial to this story and to the scandal that follows this trial, that two plays were performed for extended runs, one in Newport, Rhode Island and the other in a major theater in Manhattan in New York City. And they give readers and listeners at that time a chance to relive this trial again in a different way, participate in a scandal, come from out of town, and to hear and line up and see a packed house.
It’s the best what would be … It’s a smash hit of a play that lasts. Most plays run through the cycle of a repertoire. They might do it once and then move on to the next. This continues for weeks on end and stories about it. And then there are multiple songs that were written about this story that get played and done in Broadway, reviews that aren’t even about the trial itself. So I knew that plays were part of this. But then there’s the final aspect of this, and that’s that I framed and thought about this episode is what the anthropologist Victor Turner called a social drama. Not every crime, not every trial, not every murder becomes a larger social drama. It’s a personal struggle, but it’s not a societal issue. But on occasion, there are cases that explode out into something bigger and larger. And it’s because a community feels as though there’s some breach of the social norm.
Some part of this case exposes what’s wrong, what’s changing, what’s profoundly different about the world they live in, and they’re unable to sort of think about it any other way. So they can’t take their mind off of it until they’ve resolved this in whatever form it is. And it takes on the characteristics of this. By the 20th century we would call these … And it gets called the crime of the century, whether that’s Leopold and Loeb or the Lindbergh kidnapping or eventually O. J. Simpson at the end of the 20th century. We know those episodes. We know how a particular trial just captures the American imagination for a long period of time and that people can’t live without it. And so that the participants in it and the listeners readers are all part of that larger play, that drama that’s taking place. So I wanted to construct a drama.
So therefore, I organized the book into three acts. Act 1 is the Murder, which is essentially the story of the lives of these two protagonists, the factory girl and the evangelical preacher, how did their lives, which seemed to be somewhat similar and gravitating towards the same faith and for the similar reasons end up in this tragic and violent way. And then the second act is the trial, a trial that’s about so many things, and we can talk about that more as well. And then the third act is called Scandal, and it’s the incredible aftermath of this. After the verdict comes down in this case and the reaction of the public that wins its way into mob violence, additional murders that happen, it also becomes a part of a politics of conspiracy. There’s a production of fake news that happens about it. There’s a host of other things that are all parts. So that’s Act 3 in the scandal.
Kate Carpenter:
You mentioned that you wrestled with how to start the book overall. Were there other options that you considered?
Bruce Dorsey:
There’s a scene in the trial that I call doctor’s visits. It’s the episode in which a crucial story happens, which Maria Cornell is working in Lowell, Massachusetts, the premier industrial city at the beginning of industrialization in the United States. And she visits a doctor for what she’s not sure what her ailment is, he diagnoses her as having venereal disease. But the episode is episode two different accounts of these visits to this doctor. He, because he’s alive, gets to come to this trial and tell the story of it and what he thinks and sees about her. And he proceeds to not only describe what is her medical ailments, but his supposedly professional judgment on whether she’s sane or insane, whether this is because she seems to act like women are not supposed to act.
She has the sexual reputation that’s not supposed to, young women are not supposed to have. But Maria told some of her coworkers and friends about this doctor. She told other witnesses. So we hear her story through another factory workers account. So I thought maybe I’d begin with those two tales of this doctor’s visit. I was wedded to that for a little while. It’s still part of the book. It’s now a crucial part of how you experienced the trial, but it’s not the story that I begin with, but instead I take readers to the scene of the Richmond Hill Theater in New York City when this play begins.
Kate Carpenter:
One of the things I’ve been most excited to ask you about is how you weave the parts of this book together, because I think like a lot of writers who read, as I read a book that’s really working, I’m trying to understand how the author has put this together. And this book is a real page turner. It really keeps you going. Yet there’s also all this wonderful context of what’s happening in the United States at this time, and it must, I assume, be a little challenging to keep all those things in play. You have the through line of the case and the trial itself. You have the backstory of the people involved in it, and then you have this history. How did you do that? Did you have a strategy for pulling that together?
Bruce Dorsey:
I did have a strategy, and I like the way that you understood the complexity of what I was trying to accomplish because this case has so many different historical components to it, that one contemporary reporter who writes a lot about this trial called it the most extraordinary of all extraordinary cases for how much it talks about so many different things. For me, it’s about women, and gender, and work, and sexuality, and it’s about medicine, and bodies, and it’s about politics, and communication and a host of other topics that readers can find out about. So in part, it was driven by my own dissatisfaction with a certain approach to history writers of many others who write about a single episode. There’s a tendency to either only tell the story itself what happened, but all story with not much meaning to it.
Early books that have been written about this case tended to sort of focus on that, or historians tend to take another approach, which is they’ll tell the story for an extended section, maybe for a chapter, and then they’ll change voices and then they’ll become the historian who’ll tell readers what’s behind the episodes they might understand the broader meeting. And I became quite deliberate about a different approach. I’m not the only one who’s done this, I’m not saying that, but I spoke it aloud to myself. I said it aloud to my writer and historian spouse as well, so that I didn’t lose sight of this goal, and I don’t think this is giving anything away for the readers. I didn’t want more than a paragraph to go by before I returned to the historical characters who are the central to my story, especially the two protagonists that are there.
It is a conscious decision that the historical changes that I’m describing, the context is a part of their lives and their life stories. It is part of the way in which a episode and historical event happened. So I need to tell it as I’m telling that episode, and I need to find the way in which I can be rich and deep in the history I tell, but do it as succinctly as possible as well. For every reader, whether they know a little about this history or a lot about the history of this era or nothing about the history of this era, they’ll have some ability to enter into that context. So I deliberately tried to weave the story of the historical characters, the events and the stories that people invented and told about the stories as [inaudible 00:36:43] that.
Kate Carpenter:
I was impressed by how much history you pack in, but in very deft prose in short verse that really accomplished a lot. Did that take a lot of revision, a lot of cutting?
Bruce Dorsey:
Absolutely. And not to be satisfied with, it’s enough to do this. There’s another part of this is that I also told this story, and maybe this will be useful for those who are like me, who are academic historians, that our audience oftentimes are fellow historians. And I don’t just mean in readers that we’re asked to go give a talk at a college or university. We go to a conference and present a paper, we talk and write in a particular sort of form and voice to in ways. And that is not conducive to the way in which I’m going to sort of tell this story will extend out far too much the form of our argument, the sort of nature of that. And so much of my thinking and writing about this book was written first in those forms, and I had to stop and say, this will not work.
I need to rewrite this in a way that I’m starting from the point of view that the reader needs to see a story moving forward, and I need to be able to tell the important historical context as succinctly as possible. I never was satisfied with it until it felt like it was there. And I had great readers who helped me in that process, who told me, you still don’t need this. It can still go on with it. And that was all the way to the end. I think that revising part of it, in making those choices to be as tight as possible, but to be as rich in revealing as possible simultaneously, those are important goals to me as the kind of historian I wanted to be. So that’s what I worked on.
Kate Carpenter:
Did you have other books that served as models for this type of story?
Bruce Dorsey:
Oh, yeah. The writers who were doing what I wanted to do in this book and doing it so well, I spent some time thinking and reading about them. At that time, I was reading brilliant nonfiction writers who wrote about rich stories and history at the same time, like David Grann’s, Killers of the Flower Moon or Patrick Radden Keefe’s story Say Nothing. Those were on my shelf. Those were in my mind at that time. But I also loved the complexity of creative prose and historical setting in the prose of Colson Whitehead or the nonfiction of Saidiya Hartman or the fiction of Toni Morrison. Those were inspirations as well.
And I thought a lot about my favorite US historians, so many of whom are my friends as well, Tiya Miles, James Goodman, Martha Hodes, Bryant Simon. Those were many of the people. And then I didn’t get a chance to read John Wood Sweet’s prize-winning book, The Sewing Girls Tale, because it didn’t come out until I was at the finished stages of my book. So I could cite what its important was, but I wasn’t able to see it as a modeled inspiration. But that’s a brilliant book as well.
Kate Carpenter:
You hinted early in our conversation, and I want to come back to the fact that this book originated as a course, which I find fascinating. First of all, can you tell me what that course was like? But can you also talk about what the process was of turning a course into a book?
Bruce Dorsey:
Well, this is such an amazing course to teach students about the early history of the United States because it’s not only a compelling story that they’re excited to return to class every day, they’re excited to each week to move on to a new topic that they can look at. And it touches on so many different facets of history, as I pointed out. But it was a course designed to allow the students to understand how to be historians themselves, the craft. So they read the documents, the source, the trial reports, the pamphlets and true crime accounts, the attempts to write biographies of this woman, Maria Cornell and her story. And I asked my students to engage in the process of being biographers of ordinary people, of writing the history of why a community divides in a particular kind of social drama, what’s its larger meaning. So my students in this course were amazing, five of whom I think have gone on to become history professors like me in part because of this course.
So I made the craft of historical storytelling a crucial part of this. In fact, the final assignment was to ask students to produce a creative work of fiction as well as the history that they’d written, and then to reflect on the similarities and difference between fiction writing and history writing. So I got wonderful short stories and plays, even a rock opera that was performed and recorded for me. So it was an inspiration in many ways, but it was also at some point I knew I needed to tell my version of this story. I was encouraging people to think about what it means and how they might become historians in that process that I needed to do that history. And by the time I’d written and rewritten countless drafts of the book, although the inspiration of the conversations with my students were always there, I think they started to fade away a bit and it became my story with my creative choices and decisions.
Kate Carpenter:
I wondered, did talking with your students about the story help you keep audience at front of mind as you were writing? Just because you had a group of people who were always coming fresh to the story?
Bruce Dorsey:
I knew what was teachable about this moment. We don’t often sort of say that that’s what we’re writing when we’re writing history, and it’s not pedantic in that sense. It’s teachable because it sparks your curiosity. You want to know why, and that’s what this case offers. The opportunity and the course gave me a sense of what were the important questions, the places that readers are going to want to know why about and how would they make sense of it and what was important to it. And then in a second sense, this is a story that should be partly familiar to us in many ways, this is an episode of profound change that’s happening in the society around you.
Modes of communication are changing rapidly. People are deciding, making the decision that personal choices have to be explained as moral successes or failures. You can see how that echoes with the present moment, but it’s also about sexual violence and who’s going to believe a woman who is making an accusation against a powerful person about the sexual exploitation and how do you tell those particular stories. And so that’s what I liked about the course, giving me a sense of why this is important and why people would care about the relationship of the past to the present. It’s not a simple through line, but it’s an important investigation that we need to do.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, just a couple questions before I let you go. And the first is, what’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Bruce Dorsey:
I think the best advice that I got was to think deliberately about what your voice is when you’re writing a book. And it may not be the same in every book that you’re going to write. There isn’t a single author’s voice, but there is the author’s voice for the book that’s written. And I found that to be an incredibly helpful way of thinking about this. I found that the voice that I developed for this book was one that I knew was going to be a personable storyteller. I was going to be someone you could trust to hear this story and to know that I was empathetic to the characters that were going and what they encounter.
And I was going to present an even-handed approach to understanding each person’s motivations. And a part of that had to come through the voice, the approach that I took, the way in which I had to be that friend that you might be who tells you a really good story. That’s what I was sort of envisioning myself as being. And that was a great piece of writing advice for thinking about who you are as a writer and what your voice will be and how it might be different in the next book as well.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, I know you just had a book come out and your focus is probably on that now, but is there anything you’re working on looking forward to that you can talk about?
Bruce Dorsey:
I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ve moved to a project that’s closer to the contemporary world that we look at. I’m looking at a moment that is at the origins of the culture wars in the history of the culture wars in the US. And I want it to be, again, about how people experience it and the stories that are told, and it is focused in some ways on a particular moment in time like this book is. And so that’s really the direction that I’m taking. It fits into the same interest that I have. Nonetheless, I’m interested in the history of gender and sexuality and politics and in religion and sexuality, and those issues are so crucial to the contemporary world of the politics of the culture war. So I’m looking at the origins of that.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. Bruce Dorsey, thank you so much for sharing your writing craft with us and for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Bruce Dorsey:
It’s been my pleasure, Kate.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks again to Dr. Bruce Dorsey for joining me to talk about his work. And thanks to you for listening. Find links to Murder in a Mill Town and all of the books we talked about at draftingthepast.com. While you’re there, sign up to the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates and check out some show merch. I can’t promise that a Drafting the Past coffee mug will make the writing easier, but it can’t hurt. Until next time, remember that friends, don’t let friends write boring history.
