Newly released archive material leads to fresh look at Manson murders

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.

"The Attentive Ear"

Over the past decade, attention and its perceived opposite - distraction - have become sites of sustained anxiety and debate. Questions about attentive economies, histories and cognitive modes have surfaced across an array of disciplines, from cultural studies to computer science, philosophy and medicine.

"The Attentive Ear" (Penn Press) fills a significant gap in current scholarship, exploring the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800-1930. Co-edited by Carmel Raz, assistant professor of music (A&S), and Francesca Brittan, Ph.D. '06, the open-access book's essays span aesthetic, scientific, pedagogical and philosophical pasts, and show how conceptions of focus and unfocus have shaped musical culture, with case studies from Europe, Asia and North America by leading scholars of sound studies.

Raz and Brittan contribute an introductory chapter, "Sound Attentions," and a chapter by D. Graham Burnett of Princeton University focuses on experiments conducted at Cornell in the 1900s by the renowned psychologist and longtime Cornell faculty member Edward B. Titchener.

Raz's research lies at the intersection of musicology and the histories of music theory and science, from the medieval period and up to the present. Her previous books include "Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment," and "Sound and Sense in British Romanticism."

"The Banality of Power"

In his poetry collection The Banality of Power (Broken Sleep Books), James Byrne, teaching professor of literatures in English (A&S), anatomizes the everyday mechanics of harm, tracing how cruelty becomes procedure, how violence is normalized and how authority hides in plain sight.

These poems move from Adloph Eichmann's glass cage to boardrooms, tabloids, riots, outsourced pain and climate breakdown, always alert to the way institutions convert human lives into abstraction. Byrne braids political witness with history and myth, channeling England through its Boudiccan roots and Roman invasion, finding Percy Bysshe Shelley on the shores of Italy, and standing up to how corporate banality blame-shifts or sidesteps away from justice.

Fierce, lucid and sometimes darkly funny, this collection insists on moral attention without offering false consolation, holding open a space where anger, grief and tenderness can sharpen into resistance.

Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist, and his books include "The Overmind," "Places you Leave," "The Caprices," "Everything Broken Up Dances" and "Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems." He has co-translated and co-edited several books of poetry, including "Bones Will Crow," the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English.