The History of Speaking Offenses
Kristin Olbertson uses grant to expand her study of criminal speech trials from the 18th century.
Kristin Olbertson was almost done researching her dissertation when she found a box of documents buried, forgotten, in a Massachusetts library. Pressed for time, she couldn’t include the manuscripts in her research — but thanks to the Littleton-Griswold Research Grant from the American Historical Association, she’ll have a chance to include them in her upcoming book.
“I’ve always been interested in speech and how the way people speak defines their status and position in society,” the assistant professor of history says. “I wrote a paper in graduate school about blasphemy, which in the 1600s was considered a capital offense.”
Kristin Olbertson
As she was considering her dissertation, a book came out about the history of speaking offenses in the 17th century. Olbertson wondered why there was no such book about the 18th century. She realized all the records were still in longhand form — none had been transcribed.
“I started looking through the records and was really surprised by what I found,” she says. “None of the records were separated by offense, so I had to look through all of them, and so many were for speech related offenses, like libel or slander. So I started looking for patterns — were the same judges on certain cases? What kinds of witnesses testified?”
Olbertson is turning her dissertation about criminal speech trials from 1690-1775 into a monograph. The grant, which focuses on legal history, will pay for her to go to Boston and look at handwritten depositions from witnesses in criminal speech prosecutions.
As an undergraduate, Olbertson took a legal history class and was hooked. She completed her J.D. and Ph.D. concurrently at the University of Michigan, one of the few institutions that offer such a program. Though she interned in a variety of law settings, she found she enjoyed teaching more.
— Amanda VanLente-Hatter
Posted: Thu, September 10th, 2009 at 4:53PM
