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.
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The fascinating story of the most notorious detective agency in US history. Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was at the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital’s tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O’Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from angry strikers. O’Hara argues that American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.
Excerpt from Reminiscences of Parmenas Taylor Turnley, From the Cradle to Three-Score and Ten; By Himself, From Diaries Kept From Early Boyhood: With a Brief Glance Backward Three Hundred and Fifty Years at Progenitors and Ancestral Lineage Mankind are worshipers of idols the more enlightened preferring the man hero, rather'than the dumb stock and stone! It is war that creates heroes! Therefore the masses crave war! A few people here and there, at different epochs and periods, in sentimental moods of despondency, or of occasional religious fervor, may decry the strong arm of the sword, and advocate tribunes of arbitration; but such advocacy will never prevail and such peaceful trib une will ever be the iridescent dream of the imagination! No human government was ever established, save by abso lute physical force' - nor one ever maintained except by theexercise of that force. We, of these United States, never tire of boasting of our aft-warlike popular government, forgetting for a moment that our boasted government was created in blood and slaughter and that it has been maintained in deeper seas of bloodshed, and loss of life and destruction of material wealth, than all other nations of the earth have expended during our century of existence! The period is rapidly approaching when military force, on a colossal scale, will be invoked to determine and settle the disputes between contending political parties and factions in our government; and to suppress the corrupting ele ments and rottenness now fast accumulating! The power of concentrated wealth must and will rule nations and peoples, in the future as in the past! To this end the heterogeneous masses of the American Republic, gathered from all parts of the earth and called the populace, who are tickled, for the time being, with the appellation of sover eigns and exercising for abrief period the shadowy fiction, called eox papali - which in turn is the basis for that other fiction, Voice of God - will be set aside and kept in bounds by the strong arm of power, while superiors will maintain human government commensurate with the intelligence of the superior elements! The scramble for spoils of office is a barrier to good government by the populace. Equally erroneous is another feature of our American Republic, which is the boasted contention that State and Church are separate and distinct, and shall be kept so - that politics and religion have nothing in common! This is not true; never was, and never will be! No government formed by men since the world began was based on any other foun dation than some kind of religion! The most savage and barbarous tribes on earth have no conception of govern ment, save as a religion! Equally so, do all higher civili zations merge, finally, its aims, efforts and motives, in the religious sentiment dominant among them. The weaker sects will be subdued, and the one stronger prevail! Every political party works under the inspiration of a religion and all so-called political campaigns in a popular govern ment are in fact religious contentions - and religious campaigns! Even as I write this Introduction, and the autumn leaves are falling silently on my grassy lawn, Har rison and Cleveland are before the people for the presi deney; both parties being managed and commanded by political religionists, with a deep and pious fervor in the heart of every leader, determined to down his opponent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
