Published Works Written and Edited by
Bernard Rosenthal
Injustice in Ohio:
The Wrongful Conviction of Allen and Smith
1994, Lorain, Ohio.
Nancy Smith, a bus driver, is charged with taking children to a man who sexually abuses them.
But in a police lineup, the children, who knew the bus driver, were unable to identify the man who had supposedly abused them. Attendance records show that the children were in school on the days of the claimed abuse. The bus driver’s log showed no diversion from her route. After reporting his findings to the Lorain Count Prosecutor and recommending that the investigation end, since there was no credible case, the officer was promoted to a desk job.
In a courtroom filled with false claims, Nancy Smith and a man named Joseph Allen, who had never seen the children, nor the bus driver, are found guilty of jointly abusing the children. Nancy is given a minimum of 30 years and a maximum of life while Allen is given multiple life sentences.
She is white, he is black. Both are innocent.
This book addresses the way in which false claims prevailed because, in this judicial system, process and procedure trumped truth and political ambition trumped even that.
Today, a new trial has been granted. Allen and Smith are both out of prison and exonerated. What happens next remains to be seen.
Praise for
INJUSTICE IN OHIO:
THE WRONGFUL CONVICTION OF ALLEN AND SMITH
Paul Facinelli, reporter, Elyria Chronicle-Telegram.
Rosenthal casts a penetrating light into a dark corner of the child sexual abuse hysteria of the 90’s. With exhaustive research and new reporting, he demonstrates why the Lorain Head Start trial stands with its Salem counterparts as one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history.
Bob Chatelle, Executive Director, National Center for Reason and Justice.
Bernard Rosenthal, an internationally known authority on the Salem Witch Trials, turns his attention in his new book, Injustice in Ohio, to a modern case as egregiously wrong as any case in Salem. In his new book he examines closely the fixing of a case against two people, who had never met, of together abusing small children. The book gives in depth coverage of the trial and conviction of innocent people orchestrated by prosecutors, police, and a failed judicial system. I hope this important book is widely read and leads to correcting our dysfunctional criminal-justice system.
Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author
Bernard Rosenthal knows a thing or two about miscarriages of justice. Here he gives us one man’s journey through a thicket of outrages; over and over, ruptures in logic follow upon lapses in procedure. The result is every bit as chilling as the 17th century trials of which Rosenthal is an expert. A book to set the blood boiling and the mind reeling.
Judge James M. Burge
Injustice in Ohio is the tragic story of Joseph Allen and Nancy Smith, strangers to one another. Who were brought together by police as codefendants in the prosecution of child sex offenses that were never committed by anyone against anyone. It was the 1990’s and prosecutors around the country were growing their careers on the myth that if a child says it, it must be true. Professor Rosenthal captures it all in this scholarly account of an investigation gone horribly wrong.
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal
This book represents the first comprehensive record of all legal documents pertaining to the Salem witch trials, in chronological order. Numerous newly discovered manuscripts, as well as records published in earlier books that were overlooked in other editions, offer a comprehensive narrative account of the events of 1692-93, with supplementary materials stretching as far as the mid - 18th century. The book may be used as a reference book or read as an unfolding narrative. All legal records are newly transcribed, and errors in previous editions have been corrected. Included in this edition is a historical introduction, a legal introduction, and a linguistic introduction. Manuscripts are accompanied by notes that, in many cases, identify the person who wrote the record. This has never been attempted, and much is revealed by seeing who wrote what, when.
Herman Melville in Heaven
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal
Herman Melville in Heaven is, at first glance, the story of a boy, a lost book, and his search to recover it. In fact, Salvatore Tarnmoor’s novel—called a romance by its editor, Bernard Rosenthal—is significantly more. Young Billy may be searching for a magical book, but the purpose of his lifelong quest is to discover himself, his raison d’être. Whether the people he meets along the way tell plausible stories is not the issue; what matters is that these encounters, rational or divine, push him closer to understanding who he is. The transformations experienced by Billy during his journey mirror the changes of man as we search, question, filter the knowledge thrown our way, and then formulate our beliefs based on the people and ideas that influence us. In Billy’s case, he struggles with the question asking what is real and what is not; that fine line between the divine and the demonic, between a finite life and immortality.
The Oregon Trail
By Francis Parkman Jr.
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal.
The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. His detailed description of the journey, set against the vast majesty of the Great Plains, has emerged through the generations as a classic narrative of one man's exploration of the American Wilderness.
Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal
This volume assembles a range of criticism on The House of Seven Gables from its earliest reception to contemporary times. Bernard Rosenthal notes that from the earliest review to the present, The House of Seven Gables has consistently been compared to its predecessor, The Scarlet Letter—at first favourably, then with waning enthusiasm. With Critical Essays on Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables it is possible to trace this development, and to survey insightful critical reactions to this major work of American literature.
Salem Story:
Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
By Bernard Rosenthal
Salem Story engages the story of the Salem witch trials through an analysis of the surviving primary documentation and juxtaposes that against the way in which our culture has mythologized the events of 1692. Salem Story examines a variety of individual motives that converged to precipitate the witch hunt. The book also examines subsequent mythologies that emerged from the events of 1692. Of the many assumptions about the Salem Witch Trials, the most persistent one remains that they were precipitated by a circle of hysterical girls. Through an analysis of what actually happened, through reading the primary material, the emerging story shows a different picture, one where "hysteria" inappropriately describes the events and where accusing males as well as females participated in strategies of accusation and confession that followed a logical, rational pattern.
Medievalism in American Culture: Special Studies
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach.
Essays in Volume:
Morton W. Bloomfield -- The southern slaveholders' view of the Middle Ages / Eugene D. Genovese -- The interior or hidden life : medieval mysticism in nineteenth-century American evangelism / Theodore R. Hovet -- A new dimension? North American scholars contribute their perspective / Susan Mosher Stuard -- Personification and the idealization of the feminine / Marina Warner -- "By Chaucer's boots" : some medieval strains in colonial American literature / Harrison Meserole -- Medievalism and the mind of Emerson / Kathleen Verduin -- King Arthur and Camelot, U.S.A. in the twentieth century / Valerie M. Lagorio -- The medieval heritage in American religious architecture / Peter W. Williams -- Ralph Adams Cram : dreamer of the medieval / Richard Guy Wilson -- Louis Sullivan's use of the gothic : from skyscrapers to banks / Narciso G. Menocal -- The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California and Chartres Cathedral, France : a television evangelist's adaptation of medieval ideology / Jane Welch Williams.
Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown
Edited by Bernard Rosenthal
Essays in Volume:
Introduction / Bernard Rosenthal -- Part I. Reviews and early criticism -- The life of Charles Brockden Brown ... by William Dunlap / Anon. -- Carwin the Biloquist, and other American tales and pieces / Anon. -- The novels of Charles Brockden Brown / Richard Henry Dana, Sr. -- Sermons and tracts ... by W.E. Channing / William Hazlitt -- Papers on literature and art / Margaret Fuller -- Fanaticism / John Greenleaf Whittier -- Part II. Original essays -- The matter and manner of Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin / Cathy N. Davidson -- A minority reading of Wieland / Nina Baym -- The voices of Wieland / Bernard Rosenthal -- The problem of origination in Brown's Ormond / William J. Scheick -- Narrative unity and moral resolution in Arthur Mervyn / Emory Elliott -- Not my tongue only : form and language in Brown's Edgar Huntly / Paul Witherington -- Clara Howard and Jane Talbot : Godwin on trial / Sydney J. Krause -- Charles Brockden Brown : man of letters / Charles E. Bennett.
City of Nature:
Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism
By Bernard Rosenthal
This book reexamines traditional assumptions about early American attitudes toward nature. It also reopens and redefines the relationships of nature and civilization in the previous century, and in so doing, offers today's reader an insight into the basis for some contemporary attitudes toward the environment. The works of major and minor American writers are considered.
Race and the American Romantics
Edited by Vincent Freimark and Bernard Rosenthal
Consists of a thematic arrangement of texts by American Romantics presenting their positions on slavery. Includes entries by Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Lowell, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau.