“Harvard professors do not often commit murder…”

… as Harvard President Jared Sparks observed in 1849, the year that Boston Brahmin George Parkman was murdered by Harvard Medical School Professor John Webster. Want to read about Harvard’s most sensational crime and the ensuing trial—one that remains a leading case on the value of circumstantial evidence?

A new e-resource, Making of Modern Law—Trials 1620-1926, contains the full text of more than a dozen contemporary accounts.

Comprising more than 10,000 titles–and almost two million fully searchable pages, Making of Modern Law: Trials contains digital images of books and pamphlets, official and unofficial trial documents and materials, legal transcripts, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations from the early seventeenth century to 1926. Drawn from the law libraries at Harvard and Yale, as well as from the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the materials include not only published trial transcripts, but also popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, adultery and other crimes. Almost all of the works reproduced are English language and published in Great Britain or the United States.

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