Excerpt: It began, as it so often does, with a passing remark. Journalist Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underground, which offers a colorful and anecdote-driven account of nineteenth-century urban life, makes a fleeting reference to the gruesome 1891 Jack the Ripper style killing of a woman known to her compatriots as “Shakespeare.” According to popular legend, she had been famous in the city’s seamiest neighborhoods for her drunken recitations of the major female roles from Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice. Who was this woman who performed Shakespeare’s most notable female roles of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Portia on the margins of American society—presumably for an audience as intoxicated and destitute as herself? Her moniker of “Shakespeare”—as well as her supposed murderer, the notorious Jack the Ripper—have helped to hold her place in the headlines and in history, when tens of thousands of other impoverished women in New York have vanished from the record books—if, indeed, their names were ever known to any beyond their immediate circles. Her story invites historians to consider how apparently isolated incidents become history, and the ways in which archives can perform for researchers.