Historian Elizabeth De Wolfe's Murder of Mary Bean receives 2008 New England Historical Association book award
University of New England Professor Elizabeth De Wolfe’s book The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories was recently awarded the 2008 Book Award from the New England Historical Association, the regional chapter of the national professional association of historians.
This is the fourth award for De Wolfe's book. It earlier received the The Independent Publisher Book Awards’ bronze medal in the True Crime category, ForeWord Magazine’s silver medal in its Book of the Year Awards’ True Crime category and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) Peter C. Rollins Book Award.
Upon notification of receiving the New England Historical Association award, De Wolfe said, "I am very honored to receive this award - historians are tough critics and I'm thrilled that my microhistory, interdisciplinary approach has received such praise from historians, from the popular culture scholars, and from non-academic groups as well."
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories looks at the gruesome mid 19th-century death of a young Saco, Maine factory girl, who died from a botched abortion. The murder trial garnered extensive newspaper coverage and was the basis for several popular fictional accounts. De Wolfe looks back at these events through a wide-angle lens exploring such themes as the rapid social changes brought about by urbanization and industrialization in antebellum nineteenth-century society, factory work and the changing roles for women, unregulated sexuality and the specter of abortion, and the sentimental novel as a guidebook.
As chair and professor of UNE’s Department of History and co-director of the Women’s Studies Program, De Wolfe enjoys sharing the stories of women: “I like writing books about women that people have never heard about. These aren’t famous women. These are women who had 15 minutes of unfortunate fame.”
De Wolfe also wrote Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer's Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867 (2002), which received the Communal Studies Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2003. She is currently working on a sequel to Shaking the Faith that is slated for release in 2009.
De Wolfe earned her Ph.D. in American and New England studies from Boston University in 1996, an M.A. in anthropology from the State University of New York/Albany in 1985 and a B.A. in social science from Colgate University in 1983. In 2004 she was awarded the University of New England’s highest honor, the Kenneally Cup, in recognition of her excellence in teaching and service; she also holds UNE’s 2008-09 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Although De Wolfe is tight-lipped about details of the research she will conduct during her upcoming sabbatical, she says, “it is a 19th century project about a politician in power, it involves seduction, and the woman wins.”