The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens examines the political interests, relationships, and practices of two of the era's most prominent politicians as well as the political landscapes they inhabited and informed. Both men called Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, their home, and both were bachelors. During the 1850s, James Buchanan tried to keep the Democratic Party alive as the slavery debate divided his peers and the political system. Thaddeus Stevens, meanwhile, as Whig turned Republican, invested in the federal government to encourage economic development and social reform, especially antislavery and Republican Reconstruction. Considering Buchanan and Stevens's divergent lives alongside their political and social worlds reveals the dynamics and directions of American politics, especially northern interests and identities. While focusing on these individuals, the contributors also explore the roles of parties and patronage in informing political loyalties and behavior. They further track personal connections across lines of gender and geography and underline the importance of details like who regularly dined and conversed with whom, the complex social milieu of Washington, the role of rumor in determining political allegiances, and the ways personality and failing relationships mattered in a hothouse of national politics fueled by slavery and expansion. The essays in The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens collectively invite further consideration of how parties, personality, place, and private lives influenced the political interests and actions of an age affected by race, religion, region, civil war, and reconstruction.

The Utah War of 1857-58, the unprecedented armed confrontation between Mormon Utah Territory and the U.S. government, was the most extensive American military action between the Mexican and Civil wars. At Sword's Point presents in two volumes the first in-depth narrative and documentary history of that extraordinary conflict. William P. MacKinnon offers a lively narrative linking firsthand accounts--most previously unknown--from soldiers and civilians on both sides. This first volume traces the war's causes and preliminary events, including President Buchanan's decision to replace Brigham Young as governor of Utah and restore federal authority through a large army expedition. Also examined are Young's defensive-aggressive reactions, the onset of armed hostilities, and Thomas L. Kane's departure at the end of 1857 for his now-famous mediating mission to Utah. MacKinnon provides a balanced, comprehensive account, based on a half century of research and a wealth of carefully selected new material. Women's voices from both sides enrich this colorful story. At Sword's Point presents the Utah War as a sprawling confrontation with regional and international as well as territorial impact. As a nonpartisan definitive work, it eclipses previous studies of this remarkably bloody turning point in western, military, and Mormon history.

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