In Dave Bigler's characteristic good-humored and gentle way, Confessions or a Revisionist Historian includes eighteen articles, essays, presentations, tributes, and a love story that showcase what fellow historian Polly Aird called Mr. Bigler's "legacy of path-breaking research, honesty, and historical integrity." This work stands as an enduring tribute to a gifted chronicler's ability to examine the facts, step outside the box of the venerated interpretation, and evaluate the evidence in an new way. This perceptive historian offers original insights into the significant human events that define today's American West.

Confessions of a Revisionist Historian: David L. Bigler on the Mormons and the West (Utah, the Mormons, and the West, 16)

History

Bigler, David L.

Americas

Tanner Trust Fund

A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography

Biographies & Memoirs

Tanner, Annie Clark

Community & Culture

"With much regret we had been compelled to turn aside from our journey, and spend the winter among the Mormons," Oregon overland emigrant Jotham Goodell recalled in 1852. "Having been compelled to this decision, I resolved to pass the winter as quietly as possible." Goodell's winter with the Mormons turned out to be anything but peaceful. As a Presbyterian minister, Goodell noted that "during the time of the great excitement" when mobs drove the Mormons from Nauvoo, he had publicly declared "that those measures were both impolitic and unjust, and that Jo Smith was truly a murdered man." During the first days of his stay in the Mormon settlements in the Salt Lake Basin in 1850, he thought, "surely this people cannot be as bad as represented." Goodell's experience during the next six months, described in nine letters written to The Oregonian, convinced him otherwise. By turns humorous, sympathetic, bitter, ironic, and stinging, Goodell's letters open a new window on the dedicated frontier theocracy that believed it was destined to sweep to world dominion. They also reflect the militant attitude of the young millennial movement toward the American republic during its transition from the provisional State of Deseret, and independent nation-state created by Brigham Young in 1849, to a territory of the United States with the unwanted name of Utah. As these letters make clear, the Latter-day Saints' belief that they would "reduce all nations and creeds to one political and religious standard" was a revolutionary task. Prize-winning historian David L. Bigler tells Goodell's story as a vivid chapter in Western history. What emerges provides a new persp3ective on one of America's most remarkable millennial movements and its inevitable conflict with the young republic in which it was born.

A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodel

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library\nFact, Fiction, and Polygamy rescues an exciting true tale of international intrigue from 150 years of neglect. It tells of the travails of Henrietta Polydore, a young Anglo-Italian girl spirited out of an English Catholic convent school in 1854 and bundled across the Atlantic, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains by her Mormon-convert mother and aunt to live in Salt Lake City under an alias in the polygamous household of a Latter-day Saint leader with five wives and twenty children. Midway through Henrietta’s secret sojourn in the City of the Saints, she was caught up in the Utah War of 1857–1858, President Buchanan’s attempt to suppress a perceived Mormon rebellion with nearly one-third of the U.S. Army. MacKinnon and Alford present Henrietta’s story through their editing for twenty-first-century readers of a “lost” non-fiction novel about Polydore’s saga published during 1877 in Boston’s Atlantic Monthly. This short piece—dubbed a “novella” and titled The Ward of the Three Guardians—was the work of Albert G. Browne, Jr., a Boston Brahmin with two Harvard degrees and a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, who, at age twenty-three, was in Utah as the war correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Browne reported on and then became part of Henrietta’s story using his legal training to bring about her repatriation to her father in England through a sensational legal case. Her return home precluded an early, perhaps polygamous, marriage as a teenager.\nFact, Fiction, and Polygamy is the work of two historian-editors with disparate backgrounds working collaboratively as professional colleagues as well as personal friends. MacKinnon, an independent historian from upstate New York now living in California, is a Presbyterian, veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and former vice president of General Motors Corporation. Colonel Alford, a Latter-day Saint and Utahn, is a professor teaching at Brigham Young University after a thirty-year career as a U.S. Army officer with teaching assignments at the U.S. Military Academy and National Defense University. MacKinnon and Alford have brought their decades of research on the subject to bear on a re-publication of Ward that helps readers separate Browne’s telling of Henrietta’s story into its strands of fact and fiction.\nSit back and savor Albert Browne’s newly recovered tale and its rich blend of fact and fantasy. With the guidance of editors MacKinnon and Alford, determining the difference is half the fun and much the value of revisiting The Ward of the Three Guardians.\nNumber Seventeen in the Series Utah, the Mormons, and the West Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library

Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy: A Tale of Utah War Intrigue, 1857–1858―A. G. Browne's The Ward of the Three Guardians (Utah, the Mormons, and the West, 17)

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