Kansas Charley: The Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer - Hardcover

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a professor at Cornell University where she teaches history, human development, and women's studies.

In this elegantly written but overly sentimental history, Brumberg (Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa), a professor of history at Cornell, delivers a doggedly compassionate portrait of a 15-year-old orphan who committed a seemingly motiveless double murder more than 100 years ago. On September 27, 1890, Charley Miller-who adopted the swaggering hobo sobriquet "Kansas Charley"-fatally shot two older teenage boys in a boxcar as it rolled through Wyoming, a crime that both shocked and fascinated the Victorian sensibilities of 19th-century America. Beset by guilt and living a desperate, transient existence, Miller later confessed to the crime, was arrested and naively told his story to an ambitious newspaperman. Soon after, sensational accounts of the "boy murderer" were making front-page headlines across the country, provoking a storm of debate about the morality of executing a juvenile. Several powerful political figures-some advocating leniency and others harsh justice-faced off over the issue, but two years later, Kansas Charley was convicted and subsequently hanged. Brumberg's scholarship is impressive (the extravagant media attention at the time produced an unlikely trove of documentation), and she diligently reconstructs the circumstances of Miller's short and unfortunate life, while exposing the class divisions and political motivations that ultimately condemned the boy. But it is also evident that Brumberg came to the project with preconceptions about the immutability of childhood innocence, and accordingly, her account is somewhat colored by personal sympathies and a proclivity for armchair psychologizing. Without excusing Miller's crime, Brumberg uses his story to advance an argument against the juvenile death penalty-a divisive issue that continues to be debated in American courts.
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