The Harvard Law School Library has announced the launch of a new digital collection highlighting its extensive holdings of crime broadsides. "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library," can be viewed at http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu.

Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides—styled at the time as “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders”—were sold to the audience that gathered to witness public executions in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. The Law Library’s collection of more than 500 of these broadsides is one of the largest recorded and the first to be digitized in its entirety. The examples digitized span the years 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason. Many of the broadsides vividly describe the results of sentences handed down at London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey, the proceedings of which are available  at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org.

In developing "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders," the Harvard Law School Library relied on conservation services from HUL’s Weissman Preservation Center and digitization services from HCL’s Digital Imaging Group. Conservation and digitization of the broadsides was made possible by a generous grant from the Peck Stacpoole Foundation.

For more information, contact David Warrington, librarian for special collections at the Law School Library, at 6-2115 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Among the materials included in Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders is this 1836 broadside, which informs the reader that Margaret Joyer and Katharine Rentner murdered eight persons: “A father, a mother, two husbands, three children and an uncle, . . . . for which horrid and monstrous crimes, they have been executed.” Explore this new HLSL collection online at  http://broadsides.
law.harvard.edu.