A WARNING TO LARRY SUMMERS:

Murder at Harvard (American Experience, 2/28/05, 9pm, PBS)

In November 1849, Dr. George Parkman, one of Boston's richest citizens, suddenly disappeared. The police conducted an extensive search of the city and dredged the Charles River. Parkman had last been seen walking towards the Harvard Medical College. The Medical School's janitor, Ephraim Littlefield, who had a suspicion where Parkman might be found, spent two grueling nights tunneling beneath a basement laboratory looking for clues. What he discovered horrified Boston and led to one of the most sensational trials in American history.

Inspired by a book by historian Simon Schama, Murder at Harvard uses drama and documentary to re-examine this grisly episode. Schama plays a key role in the film as a "time-traveling" detective who puts himself in the place of the story's central characters, trying to uncover the "truth" behind the case. Weighing and sifting the evidence, he probes the lingering mysteries of this notorious trial and the larger philosophical question of how we can ever know what happened in the past.

MORE:
'Murder at Harvard': Medical College case riveted 19th century Boston (Beth Potier, Harvard Gazette)

The disappearance of a prominent Bostonian. Dismembered body parts in the bowels of Harvard Medical College. A trial that pitted a Harvard professor deeply in debt against a grave-digging janitor.

Fact or fiction? History textbook or detective novel?

Both, said historian Simon Schama and filmmakers Eric Stange and Melissa Banta.

The three visited the Harvard Film Archive Wednesday (Sept. 25) to screen their new film, "Murder at Harvard," scheduled to air on the Public Broadcasting Service's "American Experience" series in 2003. The film and the book that inspired it, Schama's 1991 "Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations," take an unorthodox route through historical storytelling, one that makes frequent visits to fiction, arriving at a truth that may be even more precise than the facts suggest.

In history, said Schama, "you have to feed both the imagination and reason."

-An Aristocrat's Killing (Craig Lambert, July/August 2003, Harvard Magazine)
-Shooting Back (Eric Stange, April 2001, Common-Place)
-All about George Parkman (Katherine Ramsland, Crime Library)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 25, 2005 9:26 AM