Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse

“This book is a brilliant and compelling intervention into how documents are constructed and how stories are imagined by those who tell them, those who hear them, and the historians who try to decipher their meanings. Mark Peel has written the first work of twenty-first-century history, and it stands as a model of how historians think and write multivocal accounts of the past. Convincing, provocative, and a pleasure to read.”

“This is a book about learning to listen. It traverses the old and new Anglo worlds between the wars, attending to the exchanges between social workers and the poor—intimate exchanges of judgment, redemption, class, gender, and race. Yet as we listen and learn, so do the protagonists, themselves caught in tides of history that prove transformative. A remarkable exercise in felt history and historical imagination.”

“Arguing that case records can be a significant source for recovering the voices of the poor, Mark Peel uses these records as a departure point to probe the negotiations, disputes, and drama of encounters between the poor and their helpers in eight welfare agencies in the early twentieth century. Well-written and engaging, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse maps new ground in its transnational and comparative scope.”