| This text is a socio-historical analysis of three murder cases and four narratives, The Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston (1738), The Dying Declaration of James Buchanan, Ezra Ross, and William Brooks, no were Executed at Worcester, July 2, 1778, for the Murder of Joshua Spooner (1778), A Genuine Sketch of the Trial of Mary Cole, for the Wilful Murder of Her Mother, Agnes Thuers (1812), and The Confession of Mary Cole (1813). Although not particularly famous today, these three historical crimes of early America were valued and published because the accounts they disclosed and the warnings they contained reflected concerns their respective contemporary cultures had about their own societies. These narratives demonstrate concerns specific to their own individual epochs and were products of what both the reading public and the printing industry anticipated; further, they were constructed in a specific way based on contemporary cultural cosmology that not only reflected dominant concerns, but also sought to control how the culture's broader conflicts and concerns should be understood. These dialogical narratives were both a reflection of dominant cultural concerns and a modifier of contemporary cultural behavior and thought.;As cultural touchstones, criminal narratives encouraged community to contemplate their own individual apprehensions and conflicts surrounding often tense and shifting issues of gender, class and race, the production of which was generally propelled by temporally unique combinations of marketing, power, political and religious concerns. And whether the contemporary issue at hand was divorce, women's sexuality, eternal salvation, the proper role of men and women in a republican society, new views of parental behavior, or the shifting face of evil, narratives were there to help define, warn, explain, and model. Though these narratives generally purport to be truthful, it has always been necessary to separate the historical figure from the literary character. These stories, in essence, became much larger than the individuals they concerned. Their voices and stories, quite simply, were appropriated to serve goals much larger than their own. |
