Review: Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University, by Richard White

Abstract

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University, by Richard White Richard White. Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University. New York: W.W. Norton, 2022. 362 pp. Hardcover $35.00. Robert W. Cherny Robert W. Cherny ROBERT W. CHERNY, professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University, has written on Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics and on California and western history, most recently in Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (2023). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 105–107. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.105 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert W. Cherny; Review: Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University, by Richard White. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 105–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.105 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search As the long subtitle indicates, this book is about several things, but they all focus, in one way or another, on the death of Jane Lathrop Stanford on February 28, 1905, in the Moana Hotel in Honolulu. The attending physicians, the coroner’s jury, and public officials in Hawaii all concluded that Stanford, the widow of railroad baron and former California governor Leland Stanford and the cofounder of Stanford University, had been poisoned by strychnine. There had been a previous attempt at poisoning on January 14, 1905, when she was in the Stanford mansion in San Francisco. But despite the abundant physical and circumstantial evidence, Stanford University officials, led by President David Starr Jordan, insisted that hers was a natural death. As White acknowledges early on, Robert Cutler, in The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (2003), confirmed that Stanford indeed died by strychnine poisoning. White explains that his initial interest in... You do not currently have access to this content.