In the 1950s, for example, one study drew on interviews with polygamous family members to downplay plural marriage’s destructive effects, and an influential article refuted the existence of Mormon “harems” and contended that polygamy was never common among Mormons. Largely because scholars have never romanticized Mormon polygamy, there has been less debate over its nature, yet many historians have been affected by shared discomfort about a practice that had been so widely condemned by society and officially renounced by the Latter-day Saints. In particular, slavery was presented as either benign or dehumanizing, with far less attention given to the actual conditions of slave life. Until fairly recently, the undeniable moral dimension of both slavery and polygamy overshadowed most other considerations for historians. Although the actual differences between slavery and polygamy are both obvious and beyond the scope of this essay, there are important parallels between the problems and opportunities they have offered to historians, parallels that are a useful introductory framework for assessing the history of polygamy. Nineteenth-century politicians were fond of pairing Mormon polygamy and southern slavery as similar evils, and they continued their campaign against polygamy with some of the same fervor and much of the same language after the end of slavery.

Dixie College and the Brooks family express their thanks to Dr. Brooks and it was their wish to perpetuate her name through this series. and Grace Tanner have been life-long friends of Mrs.

Her total honesty, unwavering courage, and perceptive interpretation of fact set her fellow historians more stringent standards of scholarship to emulate. She is recognized, by scholarly consent, to be one of Utah’s and Mormondom’s most eminent historians. Juanita Brooks was a professor at Dixie College for many years and is a well-known author.

The nineteenth wife