The Invention of True Crime in Early America

Americans were obsessed with true crime even before My Favorite Murder became a popular podcast or Forensic Files and Dateline specials dominated our television screens. The premise of this course is that the genre we now call true crime had its origins in early American writings that sought to understand the relationship between juridical and divine law, providential design and free will, and the sinner and the criminal. We will begin this interdisciplinary course by turning away from typical literary texts and instead peruse the trial transcripts and folklore surrounding some of early America’s most famous trials, especially Anne Hutchinson’s banishment from Massachusetts on religious grounds in 1638 as well as the 1692 Salem “Witch Trials.” As we move into the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we will then seek to understand how and why the sinner-criminal figure becomes a racialized and gendered type, reading across genres as various as poetry, love letters, newspaper columns, criminal confession narratives, and execution sermons. We will end the course by considering how the true crime craze moved into American fiction: how novelists and short story writers explored philosophical problems related to free will and criminality by drawing from non-fictional or “true” crimes they were familiar with. We will, therefore, read Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and a selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories alongside these texts’ related source materials.
 
This course will be of interest to students interested not just in the phenomenon of true crime but also in literature, philosophy, religion, legal studies, as well as the histories of race and gender in America. Students will be expected to participate in active discussion of the course materials, write two short close reading papers, and complete a final multimedia project about a contemporary true crime case.