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We keep the dead close : a murder at Harvard and a half century of silence  Cover Image Book Book

We keep the dead close : a murder at Harvard and a half century of silence / Becky Cooper.

Cooper, Becky, (author.).

Summary:

"1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9781538746837 (hardcover)
  • Physical Description: 499 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2020.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references.
Formatted Contents Note:
The story -- The girl -- The rumor -- The myth -- The echo -- The legacy -- The resolution.
Subject: Britton, Jane Sanders, 1945-1969.
Harvard University > Students.
Murder > Investigation > Massachusetts > Cambridge.
Cold cases (Criminal investigation) > Massachusetts > Cambridge.
Murder victims > Massachusetts > Cambridge > Biography.
Women graduate students > Crimes against > Massachusetts > Cambridge.
Women in higher education > United States > Social conditions.
Sex discrimination in higher education > United States.
Genre: Biographies.
True crime stories.

Available copies

  • 1 of 1 copy available at Tsuga Consortium.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Stroud Branch 364.1523092 Coo 31681010214930 NONFIC Available -


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