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The Genteel Gentile Letters of Elizabeth Cumming RAY R. CANNING and BEVERLY BEETON, editors Utah, the Mormons, and the West Series No. 8 Hardback. 134 Pages. / 77-91638 / $35.00 Elizabeth Cumming was from a prominent Bostonian family, well educated, articulate, and the wife of Utah's first non-Mormon governor, Alfred Cumming. When her husband was appointed to succeed Brigham Young in 1857, Young vowed not to go without a fight, and President James Buchanan provided Cumming with an escort of 2,500 federal troops and 1,000 civilian army suppliers. It is about this expedition and the
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| ensuing skirmishes with Mormon guerillas that Elizabeth writes in the letters to her family in the East. Despite an aristocratic air, she is descriptive and savors the adventure of the experience. Her female perspective adds another important slant to an important moment in Western history.
Ray R. Canning was a Professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah and author of Social Psychiatry: Readings in Mental Health and My Continuing Quest: Sociological Perspectives on Mormonism. Beverly Beeton is a former Professor of History and Provost at the University of Alaska. She is the author of Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869-96. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Utah; she has published in the Utah Historical Quarterly and elsewhere. |
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