Honorable Mention, 2025 Society of Midland Authors Award in History!

A social history of death investigations in the urban Midwest.
The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. The role of the city’s Gilded Age coroners has not been fully examined, contextualized, or interrogated until now. Sarah E. Lirley investigates the process by which these outcomes were determined, finding coroners’ rulings were not uniform, but rather varied by who was conducting the inquest. These fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.

Sarah E. Lirley is a historian who specializes in the history of women and gender, nineteenth-century history, and the history of death and death investigations. Lirley is an assistant professor of history at Columbia College (Columbia, Missouri). She has published articles in the Missouri Historical Review and has written peer-reviewed blog articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews in a variety of historical journals. She has presented her research at more than twenty professional conferences.