COOPERSTOWN, N.Y., January 23, 2004 - "Was He a Man or a Monster:
Merchandising Murder in the Nineteenth-Century American Popular Press",
an online exhibition sponsored by the New York State Historical
Association (NYSHA) in Cooperstown, New York, is now available at:
http://www.nysha.org/library/exhibits/.
This collaborative project was undertaken by staff of NYSHA's Research
Library and students from the Class of 2004 enrolled in the Cooperstown
Graduate Program in Museum Studies. Each student was assigned a murderer
to research from a collection of over 1,000 eighteenth and nineteenth
century pamphlets in the NYSHA Research Library. The inspiration for
this project was "Tell Me Not of Murder: Scenes from the Nineteenth
Century Page and Opera Stage", an exhibit sponsored by the NYSHA
Research Library and Glimmerglass Opera <http://www.glimmerglass.org/> .
Like the more traditional exhibit still on view in the NYSHA Research
Library, "Was He a Man or a Monster?" traces the evolution of the murder
genre in the American popular press from the late eighteenth century to
the end of the nineteenth century.
The New York State Historical Association is a non-profit, private
educational institution which was founded in 1899 in Caldwell (Lake
George). The Association moved its headquarters to Ticonderoga in 1926
and to Cooperstown in 1938. During the past 100 years, the Association
has preserved tens of thousands of documents, works of art, photographs,
and artifacts. The Association operates Fenimore Art Museum and a
Research Library in Cooperstown and sponsors statewide educational
programming.

More information about the Research Library is available at on our
website at:
http://www.nysha.org/library/

______________________________________

Melissa McAfee
Research Library Director
New York State Historical Association
The Farmers' Museum
PO Box 800  Lake Road
Cooperstown, NY  13326
607 547 1473 (tel)
607 547 1405 (fax)