Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman's Ruin and Revenge in Old New York by Julie Miller is a story about a woman attempting murder showing there was not just one person feeling what she was feeling -- anger, anxiety, and desperation. All of these were being felt as people dealt with a rough economic time as well as changes in social acceptance of equal rights. I enjoy learning more about the lesser-known or never-heard stories of our history. This is an example.

Thank you to NetGalley and Cornell University Press/Three Hills for a copy of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.

I loved this book. If you are looking for a historical read that is non-fiction, this might be the perfect book for you. It follows an attempted murder case from the 1800s in New York City, but Julie Miller doesn't just tell you about the victim/perpetrator, the detective work, and the trial, no she tells you everyone's history and how everything is intertwined. She goes into depth on people's backstories, showing the wide web that was cast leading up to the time that this crime occurred. She showed the ramifications of this crime, and the legal precedents that had been in place and subsequently started to change. She discusses what happens in the future and we can start to see parallels to today's society. This book is written beautifully, it is a sad but captivating story, and it was clearly researched with great care. I would love to read more books like this one where it follows a singular story but gives the context for what was going on, because I think that is what makes the story more rich and enjoyable. This was a great read.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NG for this great free copy. I LOVE “old school” murder mysteries. This book was somewhat like that along with the typical legal fight of a woman who legally fought for her life as well as women’s rights. The protagonist stood up for herself throughout the threat of death. Sadly females are still often looked at differently, but I also think that in a way maybe we are lucky? I wonder if her actions truly represented her goal. What’s worse is that she wasn’t the only woman who was viewed as disposable. I really enjoyed reading 5is book.

Historical true crime set in New York City in 1843. Amelia Norman, a young servant, stabbed Henry Ballard, a rich businessman, in the midst of a crowd of people on the steps of a luxury hotel. The subsequent trial wasn't so much about whether she did it (since she very obviously did), but why, and if her actions were justified. Ballard, it turned out, had "seduced" Norman (not always a euphemism for rape, but very much so in this case), who found herself pretty much legally defenseless. At the time, laws about seduction allowed the father or master of the seduced woman "to sue her seducer for damages on the basis of his loss of her services", but the woman herself could not. Norman's case, which highlighted this discrepancy, became a media circus and cause célèbre for early women's rights activists.

It's a fascinating story, and Miller does what she can with it, but unfortunately the book comes off as fairly slight. It's not really Miller's fault, other than that she picked a case which simply doesn't have as much historical documentation as one might want. Norman in particular has almost no voice at all; as a semi-literate poor servant, she has barely any presence in the historical record before the trial, and disappears entirely afterwards. We never get her perspective on the events, or even what happens to her later in life. Again – there's not really anything Miller can do about this, but it's hard not to feel the lack while reading. It made me think the story might have worked better as an article than an entire book, since it raises almost more questions than it answers. Still, it's definitely an interesting moment in history, and worth knowing about.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3734631032

The formatting of this ebook made it extremely difficult to get through, and I almost DNF'd this galley because of it - however, I am very glad I picked it back up. Ms. Miller has a beautiful way with words, and once I could get past the formatting, I was sucked in, reading it in a two day sprint.

I want to thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for giving me the opportunity to review this book. I admit in my joy at joining NetGalley I may have been overzealous in my requesting numbers. As this book has already been published, I am choosing to work on the current upcoming publish date books in my que. As I complete those I will work on my backlogged request and will provide a review at that time. I again send my sincere thanks and apologies.

Cry of Murder on Broadway
A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York
by Julie Miller
Cornell University Press
Three Hills
History | True Crime
Pub Date 15 Oct 2020
I am reviewing a copy of Cry of Murder on Broadway through Cornell University Press through Netgalley:
This book recounts a nineteenth century true crime story.
The date was November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the new and luxurious Astor House Hotel. Both agitated and distraught Amelia Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. She had taken out a folding knife, and stabbed him, barely missing his heart.
Ballard had survived the attack and the trial that followed created a sensation. The newspapers in New York. Lydia Marie Clark a prominent author and abolitionists championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women’s rights.
Norman, the would be murderer attracted the support of politicians journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers.
Cry of Murder on Broadway tells the reader how New Yorkers, besotted with the drama of the courtroom and the lurid stories of the penny press, followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained the sympathy of New Yorkers, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes.
I give Cry of Murder on Broadway five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!

Using ample quotes from writers from the time of the event, and a great deal of research into the attitudes and beliefs of the era, the author tries to convey the atmosphere of Amelia Norman's life. Much is speculation formed through examination of historic records. The book feels choppy, jumping from the event to family history to current opinion and back to family background, and even reviewing writer's works from the time period. It may be that it was difficult to weave all of the elements of such a story together smoothly. Or more likely there wasn't enough information available about Amelia Norman's trial without the embellishment provided by Julie Miller. Based on relationships that may have existed, and mores of the times, the author draws conclusions about likely reasons for the different responses people had to the events. Overall, it was an interesting read, and it is available to my patrons through a nearby library. For someone interested in history, genealogy, the start of the women's movement, and crime stories, this book could be a page-turner.

<B>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.</b>

Rating: 4* of five

The thing about writing books about illiterate people is that one has no direct access to their thoughts. While a diary, or a body of correspondence no matter how quotidian, might be suspect in it honesty, the lack of such a diary or correspondence makes the project feel removed, remote, untethered to the person in the crosshairs.

This is a built-in, and serious, structural flaw. I believe Author Miller chose Amelia Norman as a subject anyway because she was a woman who attempted to revenge herself on the man who callously and cruelly deprived her of a woman in her class's only possession: Her reputation. Her story attracted a great deal of attention from the press and the reality-TV-watchers' ancestors who went to trials expecting to be entertained by "...what amounted to a serial drama." Establishment pillar and publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, was among the media fanners-of-flames who, not coincidentally, are the only reason we have any idea who she was or what the heck Amelia Norman was thinking at all.

Publisher Bennett's initial sympathy for Ballard, Norman's victim, softened over time; one senses that he was a bellwether and as famous popular writer, abolitionist, and national newspaper columnist Lydia Maria Child inserted herself into the proceedings, felt the wind of opinion changing direction. As a circulation-seeking businessman, he trimmed his sails to catch the new wind.

As the trial parts of the book get going, the pace of my reading picked up as well. The reason is as simple as the legions of reality-TV watchers goggling at <I>The Bachelor</i> and <I>The Bachelorette</i> as they go through their race-relations horrors, their allegations of many kinds of abuse, and the unexamined tawdriness of pruriently peering into the complicit cast's intimate moments.

So we're moving through a trial that, in its well-analyzed in this text result, affected deep and abiding injustices in the law and society of the United States. A woman's right to bring a lawsuit on her own behalf in the circumstances Amelia Norman found herself in was immeasurably advanced by the "Not Guilty" verdict returned on that January day in 1844. The crowds were jubilant, having decided that ugly-souled narcissist and seducer Ballard brought this assassination attempt on himself by his callous actions. It helped shape the public sentiment of a time of great change, and of increasing progressive social activism. In 1848, a mere four years after this trial's conclusion, Lydia Maria Child took part in the Seneca Falls Convention, the pioneering women's rights convention. This was a moment of revolution, and its sparks would ignite much action for the rest of the century and much of the next. One of those sparks was the passage of New York's "Act to Punish Seduction as a Crime." That was the beginning of developments that Author Miller spends the last third of the book contextualizing and analyzing with what, to me, was deft and involving erudition of prose.

I'm quite certain you will all be shocked, shocked!, to learn that Norman wasn't just allowed to sink back into anonymity. She, her family, and in time the country riled themselves up about tawdry secrets carefully hushed during the trial itself. More ink was spilled when a woman resembling her was seen in, um, compromising circumstances for the day. But Child defended her in every forum against all charges and, in the end, it was her success that allowed Norman to vanish from the public records.

Which fact, in and of itself, tells me that the verdict of Not Guilty was indeed right and just. Absent her own words expressing her own thoughts on the subject, I believe her complete vanishing act...no arrests, no documentation of criminality...tells us she was just an ordinary woman who wanted, and ultimately was able to, live an ordinary life.

I wanted to enjoy this one, I really did. I guess true crime is just not my genre. I started reading it and was only able to make it about 10% of the way through before I gave it up. The writing felt bland and not energetic enough for me, and the large amount of quotes within each paragraph distracted me from actually reading. I would have preferred a more storytelling approach with actual quotes used minimally for maximum impact. If I ever get around to reading this one all the way through, I'll update my review, but I find it unlikely,

A young woman's quest for vengeance against an older lover that seduced her and then abandoned her, is at the heart of this compelling story set in NYC in 1843.
Blinded by jealousy and enraged by the despicable behavior of her ex-lover, 25 year old Amelia Norman, originally from NJ tries but fails to kill Henry Ballard, a 31 year businessman from Boston.
Her subsequent trial became a sensational affair throughout the country thanks to the American penny press willingness to turn the affair into a media circus and the American Female Moral Society, a feminist organisation who had been tirelessly trying to criminalize "seduction" for well over a decade. They embraced wholeheartedly Amelia's cause and at the end she was acquitted.
I found this story captivating because it dealt with several interesting subjects such as gender inequality, the power of the press especially the penny press and its lack of integrity (yes we still have unfortunately a good example today with the New York Post), journalism and ethics, feminism and the birth (maybe) of the first #metoo movement in America. A fascinating look at social conditions in the US before the Civil War.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Cornell University Press for giving me the opportunity to read this wonderful book prior to its release date

The book could have been so great! The case was interesting, the writing kept me hooked; I was looking forward to the solution - I was amazed by this true crime novel. The low rating has a simple reason, which annoyed me to death: The writing of the case makes up about 60% of the book. The rest is links and sources and pictures. While I understand this as important, whose idea was it to include that stuff into the reading percentage?!
I feel cheated of 40% book because I wanted to know more about this case. Guess I'll have to Google...


I received a free ARC by Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.

This book dealt with the story of a woman who was ruined by a man whom she then attempted to kill. The book also discusses the mores of society (at that time in the 1840s) towards women in similar circumstances as the aforementioned woman. The book also describes the woman's trial for the crime, the verdict as well as the means used by the woman's friends and defenders to help her and what happened to the major players in the trial. The book was highly analytical and reads like a graduate student's masters' thesis. I didn't like the fact that the chapters in the book were not in bold print in order to distinguish them from each other. I would not recommend this book to true crime readers.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The setting of early Broadway Street before it was anything like the one we know today was intriguing. The setting around the mid-1800s was also tempting. However, the story got so bogged down in facts that did not appear to advance the story that it read more like an encyclopedia entry than a story. Any one (or seven) of the little facts about her background could have been exploited to enhance things, but it missed.

Very good book , it was well written enjoyable and fact finding . If you like crime and drama you will love this .

This book sounded so interesting, but unfortunately did not keep my interest. There was not enough detail about the murder victim and it was overall just boring. It could have been so much better! Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

On November 1, 1843, Amelia Norman shocked New York City with the stabbing of Henry Ballard on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. I was so intrigued by this book because I am a lover of true crime and had never heard of this before. The book was very well researched and I learned a ton about how this helped to shape the burgeoning women's rights movement but it was also very hard to read. At times it felt like it was pulling teeth to get myself to focus on this book enough to take something away from the story. The formatting of the book made it difficult to read as well as veering off of the main plot.

4 stars

On November 1, 1843, Amelia Norman rocked New York society when she stabbed her former lover Henry Ballard in the lobby of the Astor Place Hotel. Miller's account of this shocking event and the sensational trial that ensued is richly detailed and well-researched, if a times a bit rambling.

As a lover of history and true crime, the fact that I had never heard of this case absolutely intrigued me. Miller does an excellent job of getting the reader involved from the get-go with a detailed description of the attack and teasing the wide-ranging impact of the event. From there, the rest of the book went a little downhill for me. I know that contextualizing the case is important, but I found some of the digressions from the details of the case to go on for far too long.

Despite this, I found this book to be an incredibly informative look into an obscure case that had a far broader impact that even I could have imagined.

Thank you to NetGalley, Cornell University Press, and Three Hills for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review!

this was a lot of fun to read, the writing kept me hooked and I really enjoyed learning about the topic.

Compelling, gripping and historically fascinating, this book is about an impoverished woman and her "courtship" with an abusive wealthy man which nearly ended with murder. What makes it so compelling? It happened in real life.

Amelia Norman left home at the age of 16 to try to earn a living in 1830s New York City. She worked for and lived with several families and shortly after the 1837 economic collapse met wealthy merchant Henry Ballard. He treated her badly and insulted her. After a time she followed him and stabbed him at his store building but he survived.

The story continues with abolitionist and author Lydia Marie Child who becomes interested in the case and takes it on. The women's rights movement had begun to stir and as the press sensationalized the story it drew a lot of attention. Details of the case and outcomes follow. Though Amelia committed a criminal act, many believe she was justified.

Strongly emotive, Julie Miller drew me in and I felt engaged and connected. I appreciate the history and stories about others during those times as it is interesting to go beyond the immediate scope of characters. So much emotion, so much depth. This time period is my favourite era to read and learn about.

Incorporating the massive amount of notes into the main text would have been useful, though tricky to accomplish. A few stories felt extraneous.

Those into history and women's (lack of) rights will learn a lot from this book. It's not an enjoyable read due to the subject matter but worthwhile.

My sincere thank you to Cornell University Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this fascinating and sobering book in exchange for an honest review. Much appreciated.