At dawn on a cold morning in Newport, R. I. Bruce Dorsey set out to walk the route of an accused killer. 

From the jail to the courthouse, he retraced the path the Reverend Ephraim Avery — charged with murdering pregnant factory worker Sarah Maria Cornell in 1832 — would have taken each day of his month-long trial in May, watching the way the early light struck the courthouse façade.

Dorsey, a history professor at Swarthmore, was deep in research for his 2023 book Murder in a Mill Town, a narrative history of what became America’s first true crime sensation. He’d worked through the testimony of 250 witnesses and uncovered new archival sources. But for Dorsey, the archives alone weren’t enough. He’s the sort of historian who wants to feel the past. 

“I woke up every morning and walked the distance he would have walked, on the same day of year to see how the sun hit his face,” he says. “Then I sat inside the courtroom and imagined how the sound of the trial would have moved through it.”

It’s an approach Dorsey has been teaching to Swarthmore students for more than three decades. Before trying to explain the past, first step inside it and feel its strangeness. 

History was not an obvious path. As a student, Dorsey was drawn to politics, to questions about how to change the world. But those questions, he found, kept leading him backward. 

“Whenever I pursued those topics, what most interested me was finding out the history of an event,” Dorsey says. “History was a means for me to come to a broader understanding of the world I live in.”

During his Ph.D. at Brown University, he first set foot on the Swarthmore campus while conducting dissertation research at the Friends Historical Library. That work became his first book, Reforming Men and Women, a pioneering gender history that examined masculinity and femininity among antebellum Philadelphia reformers. Its cast included Lucretia Mott — the abolitionist, women’s rights movement leader, and Swarthmore founder. 

So when a position opened at the College, Dorsey jumped, and 33 years later the thrill hasn’t faded.

“I fell in love with the process of a liberal arts education,” he says. “Especially the Honors Program, the seminar table that constitutes the central place of learning at Swarthmore.”

Bruce Dorsey

"Studying history can make you a better person and citizen in the present. It gives you empathy, an empathy for how to live one’s life without knowing what’s going to happen.”

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That classroom energy runs through all of Dorsey’s scholarship. His second book grew out of a course he taught for 16 years, built around a spectacular case — the one he went to Newport to research. In 1832, Cornell was found hanging on a farm outside Fall River, Mass. Avery, a married Methodist minister, was accused of her murder. Cornell had told a doctor that Avery coerced her into sex. 

The trial of Avery, who was eventually acquitted, divided the nation and became, Dorsey found, a study in storytelling itself. Commentators produced tales and songs, poems, and plays about the scandal. 

“I’m interested in these remarkable events that disrupt our world and generate and propel storytelling,” he says. 

Now, Dorsey is at work on a third book about the origins of America’s culture wars, anchored in the pivotal year of 1977. It was the year of Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever; when punk, disco, and hip-hop surged into the mainstream; and when Apple released the Apple II. But it also laid the seeds of the fraught and bitterly divided America of today. It was when Anita Bryant launched her anti-gay campaign in Florida and when hardliners opposed to gun control took over the National Rifle Association. 

Dorsey traces how the language of civil rights became a zero-sum battleground.

“One person’s rights became the negation of someone else’s rights,” he says, “and that discourse becomes irreconcilable, and produces the polarized world that we live in today.”

In the classroom, Dorsey’s students — many of whom have gone on to become history professors themselves — often arrive with an assumption that history moves predictably toward progress. His aim is to unsettle that assumption, to immerse them in primary sources until they can feel the friction of competing voices and the contingency, and oftentimes unpredictability, of which stories come to endure. 

It's a practice that he believes extends beyond the practice of history. 

“Studying history can make you a better person and citizen in the present,” he says. “It gives you empathy, an empathy for how to live one’s life without knowing what’s going to happen.”