Saturday, June 2, 2018

Reasons to Go Back to Primary Sources

As a starting point, I have been looking up domestic mass murders from this Wikipedia list. In some cases, the cited newspaper articles do not appear in the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper archive.  While searching for details of the Jan. 12, 1896 mass murder in Chicago, I found an Indianapolis Journal article that described not only that one, but also the Feb. 5, 1896 mass murder in the same city, and an 1895 Chicago domestic mass murder that does not appear in that Wikipedia list.

The Feb. 5, 1896 mass murder: Both police and doctors believed the murderer was “mentally unsound, and his act was the result of brooding over a recent similar crime in this city, the perpetrator of which was [the Jan. 12 murderer*].”[1]


[1] “Family Blotted Out,” Indianapolis Journal, Feb. 6, 1896, 1.

*Yes, I am excluding names of these monsters.  (Yes, monsters.  Few are mentally ill in any conventional sense.  Who, but a monster smashes in the skulls of his family with an axe to prevent them from living in poverty?)  Publicity drives these crimes, which why CNN makes them 24/7 news.

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