Join author Patricia Miller for her author talk on Bringing Down The Colonel: A Sex Scandal of The Gilded Age, and the “Powerless” Woman Who Took on Washington. In Bringing Down the Colonel , the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women's rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her "ruined," Pollard brought the man--and the hypocrisy of America's control of women's sexuality--to trial. And, surprisingly, she won.