Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested for kill­ing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, reporter Maurine Watkins wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of Annan's story and Watkins's play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the crim­inal case and an exploration of the era's social assump­tions that made the play's message so plausible in its time. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan's relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the play. Although no one will ever know what really happened in that Kenwood apartment, Cosgrove's interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins's writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan's so-called confession, and her play inaccurately portrayed Chicago's criminal justice system. Cosgrove challenges the portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder and of Watkins as a savvy reporter and precocious playwright. He exposes the weaknesses of the case against Annan and vindicates the jury that tried her.

This is a captivating story of music-making at social recreations from Homeric times to the age of Augustine. It tells about the music itself and its purposes, as well as the ways in which people talked about it, telling anecdotes, picturing musical scenes, sometimes debating what kind of music was right at a party or a festival. In straightforward and engaging prose, the author covers a remarkably broad history, providing the big picture yet with vivid and nuanced descriptions of concrete practices and events. We hear of music at aristocratic parties, club music, people's music-making at festivals, political uses of music at the court of Alexander the Great and in the public banquets of Roman emperors in the Colosseum, opinions of music-making at social meals from Plato to Clement of Alexandria, and much more, making the book a treasure-trove of information and a fascinating journey through ancient times and places.

This engaging biography of Augustus Garrett and Eliza Clark Garrett tells two equally compelling stories: an ambitious man's struggle to succeed and the remarkable spiritual journey of a woman attempting to overcome tragedy. By contextualizing the couple's lives within the rich social, political, business, and religious milieu of Chicago's early urbanization, author Charles H. Cosgrove fills a gap in the history of the city in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Garretts moved from the Hudson River Valley to a nascent Chicago, where Augustus made his fortune in the land boom as an auctioneer and speculator. A mayor during the city's formative period, Augustus was at the center of the first mayoral election scandal in Chicago. To save his honor, he resigned dramatically and found vindication in his reelection the following year. His story reveals much about the inner workings of Chicago politics and business in the antebellum era.

The couple had lost three young children to disease, and Eliza arrived in Chicago with deep emotional scars. Her journey exemplifies the struggles of sincere, pious women to come to terms with tragedy in an age when most people attributed unhappy events to divine punishment. Following Augustus's premature death, Eliza developed plans to devote her estate to founding a women's college and a school for ministerial training, and in 1853 she endowed a Methodist theological school, the Garrett Biblical Institute (now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary), thereby becoming the first woman in North America to found an institution of higher learning.

In addition to illuminating our understanding of Chicago from the 1830s to the 1850s, Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago explores American religious history, particularly Presbyterianism and Methodism, and its attention to gender shows how men and women experienced the same era in vastly different ways. The result is a rare, fascinating glimpse into old Chicago through the eyes of two of its important early residents.

Many Bible interpreters assume a biblical text has only one right meaning and that it can be found if the reader uses the right methods. Charles Cosgrove, on the other hand, recognizes that language often admits multiple meanings and that scholars must deal with several sensible readings. As an example, Elusive Israel examines the identity of Israel in Romans 11, arguing for three equally plausible interpretations.

Foreword by Don Wardlaw

This exceptional book by Charles Cosgrove and Dow Edgerton will be a rich resource for pastors wanting to reach their congregations in a fresh way. Rather than discussing preaching in general or even a specific approach to preaching, it focuses on a new way of engaging the biblical text for preaching.

In Other Words combines Cosgrove and Edgerton's critical acumen, creative imagination, and pastoral discernment to present contemporizing restatements of Scripture, speaking timeless truths in modern speech. In describing their incarnational translation, the authors invite readers to imagine what the text might have looked like if produced in the preacher's own culture, time, and place. Drawing on translation theory, genre studies, and recent hermeneutical theory, they offer both a comprehensive theory of incarnational translation and a set of specific guidelines and examples for carrying it out.

If church is like a family, it fights like one too As in any family, conflict in the church family is natural and inevitable. But the way the church family handles its fights can make or break ministry. By using stories and examples of real problems at actual churches, Cosgrove and Hatfield have applied family-systems theory to help us identify the hidden structural boundaries in any group relationship. They show how the dynamics and 'family rules' operating in the informal family-like church system powerfully influence how church members relate to each other.

The apostle Paul was a cross-cultural missionary, a Hellenistic Jew who sought to be all things to all people in order to win them to the gospel. In this provocative book Charles Cosgrove, Herold Weiss, and K. K. Yeo bring Paul into conversation with six diverse cultures of today: Argentine/Uruguayan, Anglo-American, Chinese, African American, Native American, and Russian. No other book on the apostle Paul looks at his thought from multiple cultural perspectives in the way that this one does. From the introduction outlining the authors' cultural backgrounds to the conclusion drawing together what they learn from each other, Cross-Cultural Paul orients readers to the hermeneutical struggles and rewards of approaching texts cross-culturally.

In this book, Charles Cosgrove undertakes a comprehensive examination of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1786, an ancient Greek Christian hymn dating to the late third century that offers the most ancient surviving example of a notated Christian melody. The author analyzes the text and music of the hymn, situating it in the context of the Greek literary and hymnic tradition, ancient Greek music, early Christian liturgy and devotion, and the social setting of Oxyrhynchus circa 300 C.E. The broad sweep of the commentary touches the interests of classical philologists, specialists in ancient Greek music, church historians, and students of church music history.

The Meanings We Choose is an engagement with responsible bible reading-Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and New Testament texts-for the past as well as for the present and future. Its stated perspectives are multi-denominational Christian but the implications of such readings go far beyond a specific confessional framework. In the present political climate the aware, responsible personal is meaningful for any community, confessedly religious as well as otherwise. While the articles collected in this volume, broadly speaking, can and perhaps should be compartmentalized as ideological criticism, their significance for reading ideologies different from their own is more than considerable.

Arguing from scripture is one of the ways that Christians test theirmoral judgments. But are all methods of appealing to the Bibleequally valid and effective? In this book Charles Cosgrove looksat the churchs long tradition of moral debate and uncovers fivecentral rules that can best guide the use of scripture in con-temporaryethical debates.After introducing the nature of moral arguments generally, Cosgrove devotes one chapter to each of the five rules of biblicalinterpretation that make ethical appeals to scripture persuasive. Hesets forth each rules rationale, provides examples of its operation, and subjects it to critique.Based not only on the work of biblical scholars and Christianethicists but also on Cosgroves own experience with debates inclassrooms, churches, and other Christian contexts, this volume isbe a valuable aid to readers who employ moral reasoning inreal-life settings.

In A History of Christian Psalmody, Charles H. Cosgrove traces the history of Christian psalm-singing during the church's first five centuries. It describes the nature and development of psalmody in a wide range of settings, including personal and domestic devotion, daily cathedral rituals, annual feasts such as Christmas and Easter, the ascetic practices of city Christians and desert monks, and public events of the church such as martyr parades, episcopal processions, and even protest psalmody in the streets against hostile emperors. It also explains how psalms were performed, including topics such as solo and responsorial singing, antiphony, the earliest choirs, and the melodic character of ancient psalmody. A final chapter describes ancient Christian beliefs about the benefits and pleasures of psalm-singing. Written accessibly for both scholars and general readers interested in ancient Christian music, the book offers the most comprehensive account of its subject to date.