|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library Fact, Fiction,
and Polygamyrescues 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. Fact,
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. Sit 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. Number Seventeen in the Series Utah,
the Mormons, and the West Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott
Library
|
|