Product Description

If you've read other accounts of the Dyers that have repeated the same information over and over for 350 years, you just might be blown away by what the author has learned from primary historical sources like court records, the Dyers' handwriting, the journals of their friends and enemies, natural history events, and modern evidence unavailable to the early Quaker historians. Mary Barrett Dyer gets all the ink when it comes to fame for the brilliant couple from London, who emigrated to Boston in 1635 and co-founded Portsmouth and Newport, Rhode Island in 1638 and 1639. Mary had the monster baby, and she was martyred for committing civil disobedience to the Massachusetts theocratic government. Her husband William was the first attorney general in America, co-founded the first democracy in America, and was a trusted member of Rhode Island's government, who made his mark in the 1663 charter of liberties which became a model for the United States Constitution 130 years later. The "Wall" of New York's Wall Street was raised because of him. William and Anne Marbury Hutchinson were mentors and intimate friends of the Dyers. The Dyers' descendants became governors and senators in New England--and a President or two can claim them as ancestors. In this nonfiction companion book to the biographical novels "Mary Dyer Illuminated" and "Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This," you'll learn --in short, fascinating, illustrated chapters-- the culture and events that shaped Mary and William Dyer, and the history that they shaped for us. Who were their friends and enemies? Who were their parents, and was Mary the secret child of the royal Stuart and Seymour lines? What did they eat, and how did they treat illnesses and injuries? What was their everyday life between the big events? What did they look like and how did they dress? What did they do for fun? What were the fashions in clothing, music, and literature? What was the religious belief behind the labels assigned to them by later historians? What commonly-held myths about the Dyers should be blown to smithereens?