Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. — 493 p. The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train...
New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. — 251 p. The Mormons have been one of the most studied American religious groups; still, no consensus exists about the essential nature of the movement or its place in American religion. In this study, Barlow analyzes the approaches taken to the Bible by key Mormon leaders, from founder Joseph Smith up to the present day. He shows that...
Random House, 2012. — 352 p. — ISBN: 0679644903 With Mormonism on the verge of an unprecedented cultural and political breakthrough, an eminent scholar of American evangelicalism explores the history and reflects on the future of this native-born American faith and its connection to the life of the nation. In 1830, a young seer and sometime treasure hunter named Joseph Smith...
University of Illinois Press, 2015. — 232 p. The year 1978 marked a watershed year in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it lifted a 126-year ban on ordaining black males for the priesthood. This departure from past practice focused new attention on Brigham Young's decision to abandon Joseph Smith's more inclusive original teachings. The Mormon...
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. — 123 p. Mormonism is one of the world's fastest growing religions, doubling its membership every 15 years. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the formal denomination of the Mormon church) is now 10 million strong, with more than half of its membership coming from outside the United States. More than 88 million copies of...
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. — 145 p. General editors: Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, Yale University Mormonism is one of the world's fastest growing religions, doubling its membership every 15 years. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the formal denomination of the Mormon church) is now 10 million strong, with more than half of its membership coming...
New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. — 291 p. Edited by Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth. The eminent historian Richard Bushman here reflects on his faith and the history of his religion. By describing his own struggle to find a basis for belief in a skeptical world, Bushman poses the question of how scholars are to write about subjects in which they are personally...
University of Illinois Press, 1984. — 262 p. Winner of the David Woolley Evans and Beatrice Evans Biography Award and a History Book Club selection, 1985. The core of Mormon belief was a conviction about actual events. The test of faith was not adherence to a certain confession of faith but belief that Christ was resurrected, that Joseph Smith saw God, that the Book of Mormon...
New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. — 264 p. According to Joseph Smith, in September of 1823 an angel appeared to him and directed him to a hill near his home. Buried there Smith found a box containing a stack of thin metal sheets, gold in color, about six inches wide, eight inches long, piled six or so inches high, bound together by large rings, and covered with what...
The History Press, 2019. — 288 p. — ISBN: 978-1-467137-52-9. Today's Fundamentalist Mormons in the American West resist assimilation like their forefathers. Centered on faith, they survive despite efforts to permanently end their cherished plural family arrangements. While some Fundamentalists like Warren Jeffs go rogue and corrupt their beliefs in heinous crimes, most hold...
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. — 320 p. The emergence of the Mormon church is arguably the most radical event in American religious history. How and why did so many Americans flock to this new religion, and why did so many other Americans seek to silence or even destroy that movement? Mormonism exploded across America in 1830, and America exploded right back. By 1834,...
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. — 318 p. In the Fall of 1857, some 120 California-bound emigrants were killed in lonely Mountain Meadows in southern Utah; only eighteen young children were spared. The men on the ground after the bloody deed took an oath that they would never mention the event again, either in public or in private. The leaders of the Mormon church...
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987. — 196 p. In this exciting new book, O. Kendall White, Jr., contrasts Mormon neo-orthodoxy, an emerging theological movement within the Mormon church today, with traditional Mormonism and examines the cultural context out of which Mormon neo-orthodoxy developed. While White argues that traditional Mormonism characterized by doctrines of a...
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. — 416 p. This detailed study of the excavation and restoration of the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, reveals the roots of historical archaeology. In the late 1960s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sponsored an archaeology program to authentically restore the city of Nauvoo, which was founded along the Mississippi River in...
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. — 281 p. Among America's more interesting new religious movements, the Shakers and the Mormons came to be thought of as separate and distinct from mainstream Protestantism. Using archives and historical materials from the 19th century, Stephen C. Taysom shows how these groups actively maintained boundaries and created their own...
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. — 381 p. More than two decades after its original publication, Thomas G. Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition still engages audiences with its insightful study of the pivotal, early years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Serving as a vital read for both students and scholars of American religious and social history,...
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. — 296 p. Using the concept of classical republicanism in his analysis, Kenneth Winn argues against the common view that the Mormon religion was an exceptional phenomenon representing a countercultural ideology fundamentally subversive to American society. Rather, he maintains, both the Saints and their enemies affirmed...