Allison Fredette Courtesy of Appalachian State University
Registration Closed. Event at capacity.
In May 1868, Tom Dula was hanged in Statesville, North Carolina, for the murder of his sweetheart, Laura Foster. The prior trial, his second, made national news and reveals much about regional and national understandings of “mountain folk” in the post-Civil War period.
In her talk, Fredette explores the way this real murder became a folk story, both in Western North Carolina and the broader nation. She analyzes press coverage of Tom, Laura, and the alleged accomplice, Anne Melton, and how depictions of them shifted from the postwar period into the early twentieth century, laying the groundwork for the explosive popularity of the song, “Tom Dooley,” from the Kingston Trio, as well as growth of the tourism industry around the man himself.
About the Speaker:
Allison Fredette Courtesy of Appalachian State University
Fredette is an assistant professor of history at App State. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from West Virginia University and completed her Ph.D. in American History at the University of Florida.
She studies the nineteenth-century American South, as well as the history of marriage, gender, and the family. Her first book, Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War, explores the connections between place and attitudes toward marriage and gender roles in the Border South states of Kentucky and West Virginia during the mid-nineteenth century.
Her newest project, Murdering Laura Foster: Violence, Gender, and Memory in Appalachian North Carolina, revisits the infamous 1866 murder case, using gender analysis to study the murder, trial, and associated folk song. App State presents An Appalachian Murder: Creating the Legend of Tom Dula and Laura Foster A lecture by Allison Fredette.