In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson’s countercultural “family” murdered some of Hollywood’s “beautiful people,” most famously the actress Sharon Tate, eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time. The gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion’s formulation, the end of the 1960s. They have been a cornerstone of the true crime genre ever since.
Claudia Verhoeven, associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), has drawn on newly released archival material of case transcripts for her book, “Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders,” which recasts the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship.
“Love and Terror” (Verso Books) is one of three recent books from Cornell professors. Other releases include “The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century,” published Sept. 22, and “The Banality of Power” published in May.
Based on years of investigative research, “Love and Terror” shows how the standard story of the Manson murders came to be told the way it has been. In place of this shopworn narrative, Verhoeven presents a kaleidoscopic history at the center of which is a far stranger portrait of Manson, the man who became the ultimate murder mastermind in the American mythos.
A cultural-intellectual historian whose research focuses on terrorism and revolutionary movements in modern Russia, Europe and the U.S., Verhoeven rewrites the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, an event framed by global avant-gardist movements and revolutionary violence, and an early sign of our age of spectacle.
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