Tag: Italian Hall

New Information on that False Shout of Fire in a Theater

I got an interesting email regarding my last post on the possible origins of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s image of a man falsely shouting fire in a theater. Steve Lehto is an attorney and a historian who has written three books on the Italian Hall tragedy that was discussed in that post. He’s got a fourth coming out this summer on the same topic.  He’s taught history at the University of Detroit. According to Steve, the scholarship on the Italian Hall tragedy has moved considerably beyond the sources my co-author Ellen Schrecker and I consulted in writing about the tragedy and its role in Holmes’s jurisprudence. There is stronger evidence than we realized to suggest that the false shout of fire […]