Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor that Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial -- which spanned several months -- were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants exacerbated anxieties over the purity of whiteness in the post-Reconstruction era. In Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, historian Kali Nicole Gross uses detectives' notes, trial and prison records, local newspapers, and other archival documents to reconstruct this ghastly who-done-it true crime in all its scandalous detail. In doing so, she gives the crime context by analyzing it against broader evidence of police treatment of black suspects and violence within the black community. A fascinating work of historical recreation, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso is sure to captivate anyone interested in true crime, adulterous love-triangles gone wrong, and the racially volatile world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia.

About the Author
Kali Nicole Gross is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. Her work has been featured on NPR and in The Washington Post, Jet, and Ebony.

Reviews
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso... is very much the work of a seasoned historian. Gross skillfully weaves in deeply informed historical context on the shifting standards of policing, the association of blackness with criminality, urban race relations, the deeply rooted violence of racism, and conceptions of black women's sexuality. * Georgina Hickey, Journal of American *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190241216
Author Kali Nicole Gross
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 420g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 148mm * 23mm