“The Borden Murders” by Sarah Miller is about a trial of the century that revolved around a murder that happened on Thursday, August 4, 1892. The horrific deaths of Andrew Borden and Abby Durfee Gray brought much chaos for people who had lived in a quiet town. This story is told from the authors perspective with primary sources illustrated through police recordings, newspapers, pictures, and drawings. Lizzie Borden lived an ordinary and privileged life, then one day she stepped into her sitting room and that all came to an end. As the detectives began investigating the murder, Lizzie faced challenges including sexism and had to ensure she had a good reputation on behalf of her father. Along the way, we find out that in this small town there is a neighborhood filled with Portuguese immigrants. Sadly, they were a victim to racism, and had always been seen as criminals. I found this book very enjoyable because I learnt about the way trials worked in the 1800s and seeing many cool images!
The first central idea that I found in “The Borden Murders” was: Judgment and Expectations based on Race. This upset me because innocent people were getting locked up for crimes they didn’t do whereas wealthy white citizens could go ahead living their life knowing they just ruined someone else’s. It wasn’t only citizens at fault, because the police in the late 1800s didn’t listen to people who weren’t white.
Here are some of my ides:
For my second central idea I found I used a similar note taking strategy, I found this one very helpful because it felt like all my ideas were very clear and organized. So as I read further, I saw many examples of sexism happening towards Lizzie Borden. It talks about how she was “supposed” to act a way just because she was a woman. This led the police into being very suspicious because she didn’t fit into the “correct” gender norms.
Here are some of my ideas:
For my third page it goes over the same topics and how I was able to pull all my thinking together and use my central ideas in finding the theme of the book. I tried very hard to connect both ideas into my theme to make it make sense. Both topics are very world spoken about and do connect to each other in ways. They both discriminate against people for no reason and in this book, they were discriminating people based on their sex and race from just expectations or silly stereotypes. So, the theme I found in the story was: Sarah Miller believes that expectations should not be based on your sex or race. Perhaps if people could stop making firsthand judgments or being tricked into believing our close-minded society is right, it would make lives for many so much easier, and could really have a great impact on our world. Even doing things like supporting such groups like “We for She” or “Black Lives Matter”, are the small steps everyone needs to take. Because at the end of the day, if everyone stops looking a people through race or gender, maybe there can be a happy ending.
Here is some of my thinking on how I was able to find that:
Thank you for reading my post! It is well appreciated and if you are interested in the topics I found, you should read “The Borden Murders”!
Poster was made on canva.