Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History 20160515

We have reached week seven. I am stephen berry, your host for all things morbid. Nothing different from anything else, we are talking about the history of Death Investigation, the evolution of the system of Death Investigation in the United States, which really matures and comes to age in the dawn of the 20th century. How this becomes Forensic Science and ultimately becomes the csi series. Now we all have a pretty lurid sense of Death Investigations provided by local news, wright . Right . This graphic is everywhere, i found a million of these. Always the same with the police tape and the child talk chalk outlines. We have a very lurid sense of Death Investigation, if it bleeds, it leaves journalism in the United States. I want to take the evolution of this system very seriously and talk about how it developed over time. Starting with the historical importance. The most obvious area in which Death Investigation is critically important is to the criminal justice system, and this is the most familiar aspect of Death Investigation. Coroners and medical examiners participate from the very beginning of any Death Investigation. They are there on the scene. They pronounce a cause of death. That sets the entire investigation in motion, and then they are there with the Death Investigation throughout the process until the very end, when they may, in fact, testify at trial. We cant imagine having a Society Without Death Investigation and its role in the criminal justice system, right . Anarchy. Be any one of those movies where you decide all laws are off, you get away with whatever. That is what society would be. We would have murderers. We would be getting reprisal killings in an endless cycle. We need experts to have fair consequences and precision in our legal system. This is a very familiar aspect of Death Investigation in the United States, the role it serves in the criminal justice system. I want to call your attention to two other key roles death investigators have played throughout history, apart from the criminal justice system. These are less appreciated, i think. The first is in Public Health. Death investigators are critical to our Public Health system, and throughout our history, the coroner and the medical examiner had been on the front line and battled with many of the most mortal threats, raising the alarm and uncovering correlations in epidemics no one else has seen. You have to imagine them, they they are in a basement, morbid, dank little place, doing their work. Is washing across their examining tables, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the rest of us may, in a bad life, see a death or two. They see hundreds. There is a pattern and how people are going out of the world. So they are the ones who sound the alarm. And i will give you a few examples, but you can multiply them a thousand fold. It is coroners in the 21st century who are the 20th century who are calling attention to all of the industrial accidents that we see as industrialization continues. In pittsburgh in 1907, it is coroners to raise the charge against u. S. Steel, seeing a rash of accidents they do not want. The corporation does not want to advertise this fact. It is the coroners and the m. E. s office who are seeing these things and leading the charge for improvement in industrial safety. You guys might be familiar with this horrific fire at the 1911 triangle shirtwaist Factory Company where 137 young women died, some of them of the flames and others perished in leaping out of eight stories of that building as it was set on fire. Nobody tells that story from the perspective of the coroners, who really led the charge, they had seen the damage. They had seen this time and time again, well before this one factory fire. They have been dealing with this phenomenon, and they were finally it up. In 1911, they lead the charge for more industrial safety around the areas of factory fires. Another example, in 1924, in new our, new jersey, pathologist performing autopsies discovered that radium, the paint they were using on wash tiles a Great Innovation in its day, that your watch tile would be painted with this radium paint and would therefore glow, but the way the workers worked with their brushes, they would always point to their brushes so they could get a fine enough line of paint. So they are constantly dipping this brush across their tongue that has had this radium on it. They die of micros systems of the jaw, anemia and other problems. Does the coroners that see not just one like my daughter dies under mysterious circumstances, that is one instance. It is the coroner who sees tens, dozens of these cases and starts to see a pattern and starts to figure out what is in fact going on. More examples. They are the first ones for Traffic Safety laws. Everybody gets their first car, they are overjoyed, they hit a road, and they had the tree short they hit the road, and they hit a tree shortly thereafter. So as soon as you have cars in the 1930s, there are massive accidents. There is no safety, stop signs, traffic lights. So you are seeing more and more traffic fatalities. Here or there, for those who experience it firsthand, but for the coroner, it is happening en masse. So here is a new york medical examiner, 1931, the greatest source of danger today is the operation of the automobile. Or a wisconsin coroner, more lives were lost in milwaukee over the past years from automobiles than all the contagious diseases combined. You get the sense of the coroners, they are like a canary and the call line the canary in the coal mine. They really see the dangers as they come at us. I will give you a few more examples that were interesting to me. Coroners are the first ones to raise the alarm about needle sharing. It is the crazy 1933 case of heroin and in new york city heroine addicts in new york city who are getting malaria. The other first ones to see the pattern. They are the first ones to see an epidemic of child abuse and household abuse among the working class in the industrializing cities. They are the first to sound the alarm about sids, sudden infant death syndrome. They saw it as a pattern, more and more to babies dying for no apparently good reason. They sound the alarm about aids. You can imagine these kinds of things. They get these cases where if it is needle sharing, they all seem to be addicts. They have these track marks. I wonder if they have malaria. What could be going on . The same thing with aids. During related homicides the drug wars of the 80s, the coroners are saying, low, whoa, this is a lot of violence, what is going on . A case we are familiar with, will smith is in a new movie about concussions in football, based on a real pathologist that worked in an allegheny hospital in pittsburgh and started to diagnose brain damage, repeated trauma to the head in american football players. Sort of has become [indiscernible]. So this is that role that is not that lurid, police outline, chalk outline of how important Death Investigations are. Seeing patterns, raising the alarm. As our society evolves, what new dangers are there that we need to deal with . And in a related area, diagnostics. Because they work with corpses, not patients, death investigators have never really gotten, i think, the credit they deserve for their role in Public Health, or the respect they deserve from their medical peers. But the truth is they make their medical peers better. And this has been true throughout history. I will give you one example. At the turn of the 20th century, Massachusetts General Hospital made a big push for all the patients to have autopsies. They say, everyone who dies in this hospital is going to go down and have an autopsy, and we will see if the clinician was right. The clinician says the person, madam, you have died of aids. But the coroner says, no, no. They uncover how massively awful their clinicians were in terms of diagnostics. So what they said was, oh, this has to go the other way. Part of their medical education is doing autopsies and seeing these kinds of things firsthand. Role inyed an important improving medical diagnostics, especially through the role of the autopsy, which is just the start of the panoply of tools in their toolkit as Forensic Science evolved over the course of the 19th century to produce, and by the term of the 20th century, the modern day medical examiner. Ok, im going to walk through some of these quickly. At a conceptual level, autopsies have been around forever. That first neanderthal, his drops dead andy the other guy pokes it with a stick, wondering what he died of. That has been around forever. They did an autopsy on caesar. They found a second stab wound. Autopsies have been around it is there systematic use that, i think, changes. The two possible candidates for the father of the modern autopsy are there on the righthand side of the screen. One is from 1804 to 1878. He presided over the pathology institute. It was indiana, the hub in vienna, the hub of medical science. At the time, he had access to a ton of cases. 70,000 autopsies he supervised. 30,000 he performed himself over the course of his career. He averaged two a day, seven days a week for 45 years. That is a time of a ton of autopsies. He perfected the system. How can we do it the same every time so we dont have to introduce any errors so we can produce reproducible results . And to be honest, it disease theory was bad. He hated to use the microscope. He was actually, in terms of diagnosing diseases, he was not that great. But in terms of systematizing the autopsy and publicizing it, making it an important part, he played a key role. 1821 to 1902, rudolph, maybe even more important as the father of the modern autopsy. He is a german pathologist. Basically the hub of medical knowledge in the 19th century. News from vienna to berlin. He is the one who really seals the deal on the case that cellular pathology is the cause of the disease. You probably remember this. Hippocrates thought that when we humors are outre of balance. We have these four humors that would circulate throughout our body. That is why they draw blood, to sort of reestablish balance. He is like, that is garbage. He worships the microscope. He loved it. So in addition to autopsies, he brought the microscope to the center of Death Investigation. So he deserves to be called the father of the modern autopsy. Both of these things come to the United States fairly quickly in the 19th century. The most influential is not directed here. This guy william, he studied with both of these men and then came to canada and the United States, where he becomes the most respected and revered north american physician of his time. He only performed autopsies. He told a friend, i have been watching this case, his own medical case, for two months, and i am sorry i shall not see the postmortem. The committee on autopsies said he would not be able to do his own. To his credit, he was right. Everything that was wrong with him when they did an autopsy, sure enough, he was right about that. So we does it become systematized . That is a part of science and medicine at the turn of the 20th century. Same thing with floating the lungs. Anyone know what that is . Ok, this will get morbid. We talked about that already. So in the case of a baby who was born, and you want to figure out if the mother has committed in fanticide or the baby was born dead, you would take the lungs of the baby and you would submerge them in water. The idea was if the baby had drawn breath, the lungs would be aerated, and they would float on the surface of the water. If the baby had never drawn a breath and had been born stillborn, then the lungs would sink. You can do the same thing with drowning victims, see if they have drowned because they take in so much water, the lungs should sink as opposed to float. They have been doing that since 1681, in the case of infanticide. We do not rely on this much anymore. They have proven it is inaccurate at least 2 of cases. This is going to get even more gross. As the body decomposes, gases are released. That is the bloating you see in a civil war corpse. Same thing with the babys lungs. So if the corpse is decaying, their lungs will have gases in them that will have them float. Its not great. 2 is not bad for that era in terms of the degree of error, unless you are one of the women convicted of infanticide, then 2 does not look good at all. But this bloodstain pattern analysis, it is sort of what dexter makes famous, 8 of our fivet is blood, so we have liters, and it runs very close to the surface. Every time you have trauma, you will release blood, and it has all these residues that make it difficult to clean. You can imagine bloodstains have been used for Death Investigations for time out of mind. This guy was killed here, dragged over here. Has blood on his hands that is not what we are talking about here with the splatter analysis and blood typing. Blood typing comes of age in 1907, a, b, o, all of that. They use them for paternity, as you can imagine, is that my kid or not my kid . But they also use it in Death Investigation. Bloodstain, the pattern analysis, that that comes in the 1880s. You have scientific papers focused on how blood coagulates, how quickly it dries, whether arterial blood is brighter, and the splatter analysis, what motion has what results in the bloodstain on the wall . Fingerprints too go way back, but systematized at the turn of the 20th century. They used to sign agent contracts in babylon, you would stick your thumb in the clay tablet that the contract is chiseled into, right . And even in the 1200s, they knew fingerprints, in asia at least, they knew fingerprints were totally unique and would use them in Death Investigation. But it did not come immediately to the United States until 1902. There is this very famous case called the shepherd case in which this guy murders someone in his apartment and then busts the glass cabinet door open. He leaves a partial print on one of the shards. They can prove because it is partial that it was left after the glass has been broken. It was not there before. It was not broken in half. He only put his finger on part of it. It was the first case in 1902, in france, where they convict somebody on the basis of fingerprint analysis. Juries were slow to accept it, as you can imagine. People had never thought about fingerprints. But it moves to the United States pretty quickly. By 1906 in new york, they are fingerprinting every criminal that comes through new york city and making cases on the basis of fingerprints. Other examples, the blood alcohol content test. Death investigators pioneered the bac test, and in the breathalyzer, which comes way earlier than you would think. Today, 30 of traffic fatalities probably have something to do with alcohol. In the 1950s, it is 50 . Probably higher than that before. Having a bloodalcohol test and a advisor in a breathalyzer test was unbelievably critical. Hat picture, nothing romantic its from the 1927 issue of science and invention. They have all of these guys creating a patent for a breathalyzer test. Even forensic dentistry goes way back and becomes stabilized around 1900. The first case of using forensic dentistry in court, this is just absolutely crazy, the salem witchcraft trial. This is a guy, the reverend george burroughs, accused of witchcraft, there is evidence he was biting all of these people. Of course, these people were probably biting themselves and accusing him. But they use this, and he is convicted and hung. Im sorry to his kids and pay them. It is an ignominious early form of bite mark analysis and forensic dentistry. But we all know by the 1870s forensic dentistry and dental records are a key part of murder investigations. All of this comes of age in 1900. I want you to see the historical importance of coroners and what role they played in our Public Health system, in diagnostics, and Forensic Science, the toolkit they developed over that period. That said, there have been some real problems with our Death Investigation system in the United States, given its all duece granting respect to its successes. We have a deeply flawed system of Death Investigation in the United States. Now, modernday m. E. s and in a veryperate complex environment. Not clear if they have legal for aity to do an autopsy member of the family. They have prosecutors putting their demands. They have organ transplant specialists, is he dead yet, is he dead yet . They have tough calls to make about euthanasia, assisted suicide i understand. Modernday medical examiners work in a difficult environment. They also have a rich history of corruption and incompetence. Think about, it is flipping how important Death Investigation is. Means that whoever controls Coroners Office controls the justice system. The wheels of justice do not turn until the coroner makes some kind of pronouncement about a cause of death and sets the wheels in motion. If you dont want the wheels to move, buy off the coroner. So here is a great case. In the 1950s, a man was found ng in biscayneobbi bay, blindfolded with a knife in his back. The coroner ruled it a suicide. [laughter] you can imagine the mob bosses who could control a coroner. The Death Investigation into his death would never get started. Even if coroners did not stoop that low, they could routinely get kicked back. You can imagine they get money for releasing crime scene photos, and other bits of nastiness from their own exam tables. This is been our latest this narliest bit, quite frankly. It was not until 1958 we had the uniform anatomical gift act, which says coroners and m. E. s could not take anything out of the body before it was put in the ground. Not until 1958. Are familiar with the ghouls, the grave robbers in the early 19th century that would steal whole bodies for uses at the medical college. We know that practice went out of favor. But, the degree to which they used organs from dead bodies to do pathology tests, there is a great deal about all the way through 1968. There was a massive trade in human growth hormones, which you get from the pituitary gland. We would never be able to do this, but if you dig up tons of bodies that were buried before 1968, i wonder how many of them have their pituitary glands, because the coroners can make all kinds of money selling them on the black market. Just some examples, a dallas in in thea dallas m. E. 1940s was the habit of dropping dead babies on their heads to learn about science, but they are doing it without consent of the parents. Tacoma, washington, a forensic pathologist routinely stabbed people and was writing a paper trying toounds, advance science. A milwaukee m. E. Collected the testicles from the dead to test theories about heroin use and sterility. None of that was illegal prior to 1968. End of the class, we will read mary roachs book stiff, and i will ask you at the end of that class whether we are in a better place now or whether you would donate your body to science. She writes a lot about cases where if you donate your body to science, one possibility, not inevitable, you can avoid this, one possibility is that your decapitated head will be used to test lipstick. And that counts as having donated your body to science. So, there are some problems with corruption and interest in our Death Investigation system, and problems of incompetence too. Death investigation in the united dates is one of the least professionalized, least standardized areas of american medicine. This actually bubbles to the surface every once in a while and then we tamp it back down and pretend not to notice. I will walk you through a few highprofile disasters, starting with john f. Kennedy. There is probably no autopsy that has been met with greater derision than kennedys. He was taken not to anywhere in dallas after he was shot. He was taken to bethesda Naval Hospital because he was a navy man, and his wife thought they would treat his body with greater dignity, and maybe they did. But they are a Naval Hospital. They are not accustomed to dealing with gunshot wounds, much less the president of the United States with a wound of this nature. And then they have secret service around, the Kennedy Family is around. They got a lot wrong. They thought there were only two bullets, they could not identify the wound track. With two Navy Hospital pathologists operating in this confusing environment, it is a wonder this turned out like it did. You guys wont remember this because you were not alive, but i remember this. Jordan, ofael course, one of the greatest athletes of all time. A famous phrase, Michael Jordan is better at basketball than anyone has ever been good at anything. He was absolutely fantastic. He was very close with his father. His father was murdered in 1993 in marlboro county, South Carolina. Marlboro county had a coroner, the official coroner of marlboro county, South Carolina was a parttime coroner and parttime construction worker. Said he did not have enough room in the fridge for this very unfortunate decomposed body that had been carjacked and thrown into a swamp where decomposed. Where it decomposed. So he did not have anywhere to store it, so he put it in the oven. He saved the teeth, im not quite sure why, but this became a major investigation. In 1993, Michael Jordan was one of the greatest stars on the planet, and the loss of his father was a real black eye for pathology in the United States. The coroner in this case said, i guess i have done for the Coroners Association what Tonya Harding did for figure skating. It was just a disaster. And ripped from the headlines is antonin scalia. Who quite frankly should have had an autopsy. Given how highprofile his case is. The guy had all kinds of health problems. He was old. He was way overweight, had all kinds of risks. Im sure a heart attack is probably what claimed his life, but like kennedy, the conspiracy theories that follow in the wake of failing to do any kind of analysis is a problem. You guys know the story, right . This is very recent. He was hunting at a Little Mexican border town on a remote ranch. He was found dead by the ranch owner, who said, we discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. It is remote texas, right . And is texas. They dont fly him over, he was pronounced dead with a cause of death by phone. Essentially. Because that is the way the system works. It has all kinds of holes. And once trump hears about this, he says it is a horrible topic, but they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual face to find a pillow. And michael savage, the conservative radio host, says this will get bigger and bigger and bigger, saying we need a war on commission, the notion that a Supreme Court justice has been snuffed out with a pillow over his face. Not that that would happen if a standardized system existed. These are just the high profile disasters. Quite frankly, we dont have a system. Thats part of the problem. As late as 2009, the National Academy of sciences omitted that Death Investigation in the United States is fragmented, deficient, hodgepodge, and disjointed. We dont have a system. Is the essentially have medical examiner, whose goal should be justice and science, overlaid on top of a much older system, the system of the coroner. It is the system of the coroner that i want to talk about for the rest of our lecture today. I dont want to turn coroners into the villains of the story. Thats not my point. Many of the advancements i laid out at the beginning, those were coroners. They were on the front lines of our Public Health and discovered these threats and came forward. I dont want to slight them. I do want to say im in a story and, so im a historian, so i want to talk about what is in their dna, which is to say the Coroners Office, going way back to time out of mind, is not interested in justice or science. We would hope they would be. Its always been interested in something else. Something approximating that, but not exactly the same. Does anyone know where the word coroner comes from . Corona. Latin for crown. In hamlet, they call the coroner a crowner. Essentially he is a representative of the king. So what you could do is think way back into medieval england, and youve got the sheriff of nottingham, who is squeezing the peasants and taking all of their money, and none of that money is going to the king, so the king invents the coroner. The king needs someone who can go around the sheriff and make sure that revenue is running where it ought, to the king. The coroner is essentially the kings vulture. Its constantly flying around, and whenever there is a dispute descendsm, the vulture to make sure the king gets his end. Propertyave a death, is loose from its legal mornings. Didio property . Did he commit suicide . If he committed suicide, that is a crime against religion. The king seizes the estate. Heres the craziest one. If they found a dead norman on the village commons, they on the wholex village called murderum, where we get the word of murder. You see this inconsistent imprint. In france and germany, they developed a medical Examiner System much earlier. Only in places that have the british imprint do you have the office of the coroner. So, one of the things i would the to suggest is that coroner is really a creature of the state. Instead of thinking of the coroner as someone on the side of justice and science. Thats whats involving in this period. Really just a creature of the state. If the state is on the side of justice, if the state is on the side of science, the coroner might be there too, but if the state has other interests, other preoccupations, the the coroner will be the tool of those interests. Captured by those preoccupations. And here we arrive at our assignment. Illustrate the point i have just made to illustrate the point i have just made, that the s dna is not necessarily in science and justice, but representing the interests of the state, we are going to do a deep dive into coroners reports from the 19th century south using csidixie. Org. This website takes 1582 inquests that were done in South Carolina between 1800 and 1900. It did just size it digitizes them, but also tells you, was this homicide or suicide . Accidental death . All that. What you will see as you get into this assignment, these are the coroners reports as i first came across them when i was at the South Carolina department of archives. Im one morbid do. Dude. I have been fixated on death since i was a little kid. I was always destined to open this box of coroners reports in South Carolina. The minute i opened it, how many are in here . Its all endings, right . I will know nothing of any of these lives, like the happy moments will stop perfectly lost. I will only know the end. Every time i take it up, it does not end well. They all end different. For this weird moment, i thought, thats true of all of us. Different, we all end the same. No one has ever escaped mortality. Moment, the poet named death was looking down. We were all making our varied ways to the grave. I became fixated on them. Thats part of why it i put this project together and why im inflicting it upon you, so you can become fixated on it too. This is the state versus the dead body of slave property. Its just a weird way of writing it. Legal terms, when you commit murder, you dont commit murder against the person, you commit it against the peace and dignity of the state. But thet money anymore, state has an interest its protecting all these cases. This is how i found them, they were a try folded little bundle with a bunch of endings. 1582 of them. Let me show you how they work so you wont get confused. Every one of them has a cover sheet. Butoesnt look like a form, it is pretty well standardized, and standardized by law. In this case, its the state of South Carolina. An inquisition indented in the woods near william gardeners. It always starts with that. An inquest and inquest inquest has to take place where the body lies. This inquest is taking place in the woods near william gardner. You always get a date. You get a coroner, in this case he is a justice of the quorum. I wont even get into what that is. You get a dead guy, in this case the body of alexander mcgee. You get the jurors, in this case white man, 12 white men. And you get this phrase, which i became addicted the finding, do ay upon their oath. It became a rhapsody sort of thing to me, because that was always my queue that someone was walking out. In this case, he became deranged or insane. He died of exposure. This is an era in which they would routinely treat people with problems at home. They would essentially lock their loved one up, and he would escape. Student and i guess they were like, mental right. Not in 1817. You will start to see in South Carolina and other places, reform movements for , facilities for the and blind,af insane. But you would have to do it at home. In this case, he escaped and died of exposure. It does give you some data. What i am saying, that is just one of the pages in a typical coroners report. In this case, what you have is a dissenting opinion, what i would call a minority report will stop in the a minor airport. A minority report. In this case, a man was charged take a slave to the slave jail. The slave was injured and could ginowalk past enough, so lashed a chain around his neck and dragged him until he was dead. Well, andrors said, this guy was like, are you kidding . Undoubtably a racist, undoubtably in support of slavery, but if other boundaries at least. So he writes this minority report. And you get the testimony of women and slaves. They cant testify at trial. But they can testify before a coroners inquest. It is written out by the coroner himself, or another white man, so it is testimony that moves through white patriarchy to be documented. But it is essentially their version of what happened. So we get cases where an inquest jury finds that the slave woman died of apoplexy. But her daughter says, my mom was hit with a shovel. So we get traces of what really happened in these inquest files. Hint of thesome poor whites of the antebellum south. These people are making their mark. This is william hall. He cant actually write his name, the coroner has written his name for him. Men, but theyhite are all a literate, in this case illiterate, in this case. So you get much more evidence than just the cover sheet. We dont really know what an inquest looks like. There are not people who have left descriptions of what it was like. This is nothing we do now. Somebody dies and you leave the body there for a long time. Did you get 12 people to stand over it and call on other people and say, oh, yeah, i saw that guy want passed me two hours ago or whatnot. We just dont do it that way. This is a cartoon from 1826. I actually think its pretty good at getting what an inquest was like. You wont be able to read this, but one of the jurors said, the man is alive, serve, for he has opened one eye. Said, i shall proceed with the inquest. What is going on here, what do you notice . Who is this guy, probably . This guy probably owns the house. You have to be able to decode the way they would draw things in the 19th century. Highclass,early given the week and whatnot, this cowering dog. This guy is the homeowner. These guys are code for lower class. They are the jurors. They would always write to them with repulsive faces and unkempt hair. These guys are poor. What you see here is overlapping layers of authority. In this one really cramped space. Theres the authority of the of brought them all here to discover if someone peacerdered against the and dignity of the state. You get medical authorities in the form of the doctor whos already made his pronouncement. This is actually a religious figure. Inheres inegitimacy giving meaning to our mortality and explaining to us what we should do with our feelings when bad things happen. Why would god allow these things to happen . So there is the authority of religion. There is an authority to local knowledge, too. So these guys are not as wellfed, but they actually know the guy is not dead. So they have an Authority Based on local circumstances. Then theres this authority of death itself. Because there are crammed into this space, and theyre really one facing death together in the same intimate place. I want you to remember that, that inquest was the product of this cultural process of grappling with death and coming to some kind of conclusion. These guys are probably not interested in science or injustice, per se. They have a more simple sense of things. This is a book by one of my friends, Laura Edwards the people and their pieceace. Just think about this book as you are working on your inquest. Thatrgument is essentially what was most important in this period was the piece, not justice. Whatever was true yesterday should be true tomorrow. So when you have a death, you , anda rift in the piece those 12 men, 13 men, they are essentially trying to come to some sort of satisfactory conclusion and return us to the piec eace. At the county level, where you have the coroners inquest, their life is much more subtle. Laws are often ignored. That is why women and slaves can testify. Because it is not exactly a legal proceeding or a judicial proceeding. It is a proceeding of the community to restore order to the community. So women and slaves testified that inquest because they know what was true yesterday, and what should they be the true tomorrow should maybe be true tomorrow. It is different from our sense of the fbi, the Sheriffs Office , all these people who sole function is to compel us to obey the law. This is a different sort of endeavor altogether. Of aggregatet us, to giveases for you a sense of what i learned from doing, from seeing this a lot. Also, what came out of that massive box. To tell you the truth, what came what i should have known when i started, and what a social worker would have told me in two seconds. I went through all these cases to discover, ok, and a social worker would have come to me and said, tell me about this place. I would say, well, its a land of massive rural poverty. Its a land where most whites are radically underemployed. Its a land of rapid alcoholism. It is a land where there are no social services. Where there is no treatment for addiction. Where there is no access to birth control. And she or he would have told me, ok, i will tell you exactly what you would look like from the morgue. They dont teach the kids, so they are going to drown. They dont have access to birth control, so you will have massive numbers of unwanted pregnancies and dead babies. You will have alcoholic fathers who will have a decimating amount of spousal abuse and child abuse. And you will have souls so desperate that they will hang themselves before they live in that world anymore. You are a know, if white male in spartanburg, South Carolina and the coroner is standing above your body, how you die . Accommodation of alcohol and stupidity. We have this idea the old south particularly has this place of knife fights and i gouging and tooling. It is so much sadder than that. Gouging and due ling, but it is so much sadder than that. If you were a white female, the coroner says how did you die . If you are an africanamerican male, you hung yourself. Its all land of no social services, a place where white men are drinking themselves and their dependents to death. A land of massive rural poverty and inequality. And thats the way people go out of the world, in such a place. Your assignment is going to be is going to be to write up one inquest as a narrative story. Take it as a starting point and use it to tell me something about life and death in the 19th century south. You just take one case. And you try to peel it like an onion. Tell its story, but also try to branch out. To give you an example, i am going to end with one story dixie. From the story of the death of james cook in hamburg, South Carolina in 1876. This is where we will end, with this one story. This map i know is probably hard for you to see. Hamburg is right here, directly across the Savannah River from augusta. Here is the Savannah River, which is rolling down to the sea here. Here is the port of charleston. One of the most important cities in the antebellum south. So hamburg had been settled in 1820 by henry scholz, who named the town after the famous city in his native germany. It became a hub of wagon traffic. Pulling cotton from the interior of the south. We are have railroads yet. We do not have railroads yet. Most cargo is going by river. That is 1820. By 1825, they held this they build this railroad. The b o railroad is a famous common carrier. The baltimore and ohio railroad. If you look on wikipedia right now, it will say that it was the longest common carrier in the United States, because everybody forgets about the hamburg to charleston line chartered in 1827. It was the Worlds Largest railroad in its completion in 1833, and 60,000 bales of cotton worth 2 million moved through hamburg each year. Student and im guessing this area before that was economically depressed . Yes, and that is what we would see afterward. What happens to hamburg is that it becomes a spur town, where the railroad goes around it. Finds another route. By 1876, hamburg is a ghost town, essentially. What you have after the civil war is africanamericans specialized in these places. If you are africanamerican after the civil war, real estate what real estate do you actually own . None. 40 acres and a mule . Forget about it. We are all familiar to the degree of which the africanamerican Church Becomes a center to not just religious life, but political life and civil life. A real estate problem. Thats the one building may have. It becomes a schoolhouse and a Recreation Center and a political incubator and a place where people gather. With the firebombing of churches, that is doing more than just attacking the Spiritual Life of the people. Have been left behind in ghost towns. You can buy this real estate for relatively cheap, and you can erect an africanamerican town where you can safeguard yourself, your kids, and your community. So thats what hamburg is. I 1876, it essentially has 600 residents. 1 5 of them are white. They are fine living in the community, this is great. This is the story that i would tell about hamburg in 1876. July 4, 1870 six, its the 100 year birthday of the United States. The president of the United States, ulysses s. Grant, says, what do we do . Well, every town should have a militiawhich is a march, and they should write the towns history, and they should read the declaration of independence. We would sort of collective those towns histories and it would be a biography of america, and its going to be great. Idea for july 4, 1876. The africanamerican towns, they dont have a militia or bullets, it doesnt matter, they are marching, having a good time, they have read the declaration of independence. The centerrching on square of the town which they botch with their own money. They bought with their own money. Right here are two guys watching these guys marched under their , a guy namedins doc adams. This was one witness who remembered the marching. They were most equal to any company, white or colored. Hansen and butler along to the butler print edition. To get there, they had to come across the river from augusta,. Here they have done trading they are constantly having to come through hamburg on the way to augusta from the plantation. And it is driving them crazy because it is such a successful africanamerican town. Driving them crazy probably that these are black men with guns, that they are so well ordered and well drilled, and they are so happy. This represents everything that they dont want to see in the history of the United States. So they drive their widen directly into the they drive their wagon directly into the parade. They could have gone around easily. They dont stop they dont. They drive directly up to the parade, and they demand that doc adams essentially disperse his militia. He says, i dont know why i would do that. This is what the president of the United States wanted all his towns to do. He says, doesnt matter, this is the route i always travel. I sort of like that mentality, this is the route i travel. I cannot be in a new place, and a new space, thinking new thoughts. This is the route i always travel. Says dams relates and s andes and says relent says open order. And then everybody goes home on a depressing end to the fourth of july. Tommy butler and his father go to the Sheriffs Office at hamburg to swear out a warrant on doc adams and his militia for obstructing a public road. Meet prince rivers. This is one of the more remarkable stories from reconstruction. He is essentially the trial justice in the town, the mayor of hamburg, and the general of the militia. He wears a lot of hats. They come to his office to swear the complaint. I want to give you a bit of a back story. This is the best picture we have of prince rivers. He had been born in slavery. He taught himself to read and write. He was a carriage driver in beaufort, South Carolina. As soon as the civil war starts, he jumps on his carriage horse and rides to freedom. He joins the United States colored troops and becomes a sergeant. He is attacked in new york because he has chevrons, and even whites there dont want to see a black officer, anymore than one who holds his own. This guy was one tough hombre. His own commander said readers had no equal. There is not a white officer in his regiment who has such ability. I see no reason why he should not command the army of the potomac. And if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he should the its king. Be its king. He did not become the king of South Carolina, but he was known as the black prince, the power of aiken county. Edgefield county, the most unreconstructed county in South Carolina, has accounted carved out of it, and he is trying to make a go