In January 1886, two brothers named Ed and Charley Brown accidentally spilled molasses on a white man's sleeve while making a delivery to a saloon in Carrollton, Mississippi. The man accepted their apology. The matter should have ended there. Instead, a local attorney named James Monroe Liddell decided to make the accident his personal cause, confronting the Browns weeks later and igniting a chain of events that would end in one of the deadliest acts of racialterrorism in American history. On March 17, 1886, as the Brown brothers stood trial in the Carroll County Courthouse, between fifty and one hundred armed white men stormed the building and opened fire on every Black person inside. Twenty-three people were killed. No one was ever charged.

In August 1898, a small package arrived at a prominent home in Dover, Delaware, bearing no return address. Inside: a box of chocolate bonbons, a cambric handkerchief, and a note reading "With love to yourself and baby." Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning shared the candy with her sister Ida Harriet Deane and several guests on the family porch that evening. Within hours, everyone who ate the chocolates was violently ill. Within days, Mary and Ida were dead from arsenic poisoning.

The killer was Cordelia Botkin, a woman sitting three thousand miles away in San Francisco. She had nevermet her victims. Her target had been the family of her former lover, Associated Press correspondent John Preston Dunning, who had ended their three-year affair when he departed for the Spanish-American War. Botkin purchased arsenic from a drugstore on Market Street, laced a box of bonbons from George Haas and Sons Confectionery, and mailed the package from the Ferry Post Office. She had weaponized the United States Postal Service.

The investigation that followed linked Botkin to the crime through handwriting analysis, drugstore receipts, candy shop identification, and a price tag she forgot to remove from the handkerchief. San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lees coordinated the cross-continental investigation, and handwriting expert Daniel T. Ames matched Botkin's penmanship to the package and anonymous letters she had previously sent to the family. Her trial in San Francisco captivated the nation, with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner erecting a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to update the crowds.

In the woods above Brattleboro, Vermont, a 65-foot stone tower has stood since the 1890s. It was not built by architects or hired masons. It was built by the patients of an insane asylum, stone by stone, under the direction of their doctors who believed that breaking rocks could fix broken minds. But some patients found another use for the tower they had built with their own hands. They climbed it one last time. In 1938, officials sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers.

This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution.