Examine post-war Philadelphia's gender, class, and societal shifts.
Set a decade after Union victory in the American Civil War, Murder by Degrees invites readers into a thrilling murder mystery. It also offers a view of an American city radically transformed by the Civil War, particularly women’s public facing wartime work in medicine, science, and education, as well as class dynamics in a growing urban environment entering an great age of wealth known as the “gilded age.” This talk explains how and why the Civil War catalyzed these major changes in American intellectual life and society, especially when it came to issues of gender, class, and belonging in post-war Philadelphia.
Timothy J. Williams is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He works in the field of nineteenth-century U.S. history and focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of the American Civil War era. He is the author of Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and editor, with Evan A. Kutzler, of Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866. He is currently writing an intellectual history of Civil War prisoners of war and their wartime and postwar writings. A Michigan native who grew up in Virginia, Tim holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The “cozy mystery” is his favorite genre of fiction, especially Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.
Murder by Degrees is a thrillingly atmospheric tale of intrigue, featuring a brilliant female doctor who’s ahead of her time. Set in Philadelphia, 1875, the debut novel by Ritu Mukerji, Dr. Lydia Weston is preparing for the start of a new term at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, when the body of a young woman is fished out of the Schuylkill River. The death is ruled a suicide, but Lydia is suspicious. As the investigation unfolds, Lydia puts to use all her diagnostic skills and autopsy table acumen to pursue the killer.
Ritu Mukerji was born in Kolkata, India, and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. From a young age, she has been an avid reader of mysteries, from Golden Age crime fiction to police procedurals and the novels of PD James and Ruth Rendell. She received a BA in history from Columbia University and a medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. She completed residency training at the University of California, Davis and has been a practicing internist for fifteen years. She lives in Marin County, California, with her husband and three children.
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Questions? Contact beccar@dpls.lib.or.us
AGE GROUP: | Adult |
EVENT TYPE: | Adult Program |
The two-story, 38,855-square-foot library opened in 1998 and features exposed beams and high ceilings, complemented with eastward-facing windows, looking over Bend’s civic square.
