Gender and the Historicity of Parricide: A Case Study from the Nineteenth-Century North American West

Abstract

‘Gender and the Historicity of Parricide: A Case Study from the Nineteenth-Century North American West’, by Peter Boag, places parricide in the context of larger social forces. In this case, the alchemy of agrarian depression, rural decline, problematic boyhood, idealized motherhood and imperilled fatherhood created the horrific events that tore apart a family and a North American farming community in the 1890s. Exploring a double parricide committed in a rural, western American community in 1895, Boag uses historical evidence and source critique to challenge the traditional psychological and sociological explanations of parricide.