“This study of the history of coroners’ inquests in St. Louis during the late nineteenth century makes a valuable contribution to death studies. Providing a look into the lives of ordinary people and the factors that shaped investigations, Sudden Deaths illuminates the social meanings and implications of class and urban economy in the Gilded Age.”—
Keona K. Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis
“The ordinary men and women who people this book meet tragic ends—driven to death by grief at the loss of a child, killed at work in a boiler explosion, fatally beaten by a spouse, or dying from a botched abortion. Lirley brings a strong sense of justice to a fascinating source base and reveals the drama of social history.”—Alison Clark Efford, author of German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship, in the Civil War Era
“In this fascinating, new exploration of coroners’ inquests and violent deaths in Gilded Age St. Louis, Lirley uncovers how one’s social standing—whether they were ‘respectable’ or ‘rough,’—shaped interpretations of their death. Connecting race, class, and gender with questions of insanity, homicide, suicide, abortion, alcoholism, and medicine in death testimonies and verdicts, Lirley extends a history more relevant today than ever.”—Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, author of Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America
“This meticulously researched book uses nineteenth-century investigations of suspicious deaths as a window into the private circumstances and public meanings of the lives and deaths of St. Louisians. Lirley’s exhaustive research into coroner’s records is a treasure trove of information about the daily worlds of women, African Americans, and immigrants navigating work, domestic conflict, pregnancy, alcoholism, and depression.”—Catherine E. Rymph, author of Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right
“Lirley provides a provocative look at the Gilded Age from a unique perspective that explores not just race and gender but also the seamy undersides of both cities in the period and the ways deaths were reported and treated.”—Jeffrey Smith, author of The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America
“In the early Gilded Age, elected St. Louis coroners investigated unexpected death, such as those resulting from domestic violence, suicide, abortion, or traumatic accident. These coroners brought not only science and law to their work but social judgment. Similar deaths were often judged differently. They could spare a respected family embarrassment on the one hand, or effectively condemn those judged guilty of moral turpitude—prostitutes, the dissolute, the perpetrators of domestic violence, or the sin of poverty, on the other. Lirley’s revealing study is the first to make systematic use of these now readily accessible records, reconstructing both the harshness and occasional charity that still resonate in our world of opioid and COVID-19 deaths.”—Kenneth H. Winn, editor of Missouri Law and the American Conscience: Historical Rights and Wrongs
“In this captivating study of death, we learn a great deal about life, especially the lives of the marginalized in Gilded Age urban America. Lirley mines overlooked coroners’ inquests in turn-of-the-century St. Louis, rich sources for historians of violence, medicine, family and labor, for the social meaning of death. In her gleaning of witness testimony, Lirley unearths obscured or hidden topics, affording historians a rare glimpse into the daily lives, and deaths, of poor and working-class Americans, including immigrants, prostitutes, the addicted and African Americans. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the study of death.”—Diane Miller Sommerville, author of Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South
