Mormon America

In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with two thousand soldiers, bound for California. At the time, the nation was hell-bent on expansion: James K. Polk had lately won the presidency by threatening England over the borders in Oregon, while Congress had just voted to annex Texas. After Mexico declared war on the United States, Kearny’s Army of the West was sent out, carrying orders to occupy Mexican territory. Winston Groom recounts the amazing adventure and danger that Kearny and his troops encountered on the trail.

Among all the various figures in 19th century America who left controversial legacies, it is hard to find one as influential as Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism, and the Latter-Day Saint movement. Revered as a prophet on the level of Moses by some, reviled as a perpetrator of large-scale fraud by others, what everyone can agree on is that Joseph Smith founded a religious movement that played a crucial role in the settlement of the West, especially in Utah.

On April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith gave a sermon in Nauvoo, Illinois, to nearly 20,000 church members. A few weeks earlier, a church member and close friend of Joseph named King Follett was killed in an accident. This well-known event in Nauvoo led Joseph Smith to comment specifically on Follett’s death and to address what Joseph called “[T]he subject of the dead”.

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn craftsman from New York whose impoverished and obscure life was electrified by the Mormon faith. He trudged around the United States and England to gain converts for Mormonism, spoke in spiritual tongues, married more than 50 women, and eventually transformed a barren desert into his vision of the Kingdom of God. While previous accounts of his life have been distorted by hagiography or polemical exposé, John Turner provides a fully realized portrait of a colossal figure in American religion, politics, and westward expansion.

Orrin Porter Rockwell believed in his prophet, Joseph Smith. He spent most of a year chained in an Independence dungeon for his belief, then walked across Missouri to Nauvoo, stumbling into Joseph’s house on Christmas Day. Joseph said to him then, “Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee,” and the legend was born. But although he walked with presidents and generals, scholars and scoundrels, in a life lived at the center of many of the great events of the American frontier, he has remained an enigma, a source of continuing controversy.

The Mormon trek westward from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley was an enduring accomplishment of American overland trail migration; however, their wintering at the Missouri River near present-day Omaha was a feat of faith and perseverance. Richard E. Bennett presents new facts and ideas that challenge old assumptions - particularly that life on the frontier encouraged American individualism.

In 1851, Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park re-creates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois.

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the 30-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 by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians.

In Frontier Religion, Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic influence these perceptions of the frontier had on Mormonism and other religions in America. Endeavoring to better understand the sway of the frontier on religion in the United States, this book follows several Mormon-American conflicts, from the Utah War and the antipolygamy crusades to the Reed Smoot hearings. The story of Mormonism’s move toward American acceptability represents a larger story of the nation’s transition to modernity and the meaning of religious pluralism.

In 1830, a young seer and sometime treasure hunter named Joseph Smith began organizing adherents into a new religious community that would come to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and known informally as the Mormons). One of the nascent faith’s early initiates was a twenty-three-year-old Ohio farmer named Parley Pratt, the distant grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In The Mormon People, religious historian Matthew Bowman peels back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine.

Polygamous wives were participants in a controversial and very public religious practice that violated most 19th-century social and religious rules of a monogamous America. Harline considers the questions: Were these women content with their sacrifice? Did the benefits of polygamous marriage for the Mormons outweigh the human toll it required and the embarrassment it continues to bring?

On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.

Stephen Mansfield, the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, has highlighted the growing popularity of Mormonism—a belief system with cultic roots—and the implications of its critical rise. Mormons are moving into the spotlight in pop culture, politics, sports, and entertainment via presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, media personality Glenn Beck, mega-bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, and The Book of Mormon, the hottest show on Broadway.

With wit and sensitivity, Behind the Mormon Curtain takes a deep dive into the quintessential American religion and the world's oldest profession, as Cuno tells the story of what he discovered, how he discovered it, and what it reveals not just about Mormons, but about us all.

In Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy, historian Merina Smith explores the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, a development that unfolded amid scandal and resistance. Smith considers the ideological, historical, and even psychological elements of the process and captures the emotional and cultural detail of this exciting and volatile period in Mormon history.

As a born and raised Mormon I was taught over and over to study the Book of Mormon in order to get a testimony. I've done just that and what I've replicated is not what members will be happy with and will surprise those of you not of the Church despite what you may have already learned. The establishment of the LDS Church is directly linked with the establishment of this nation and explains the chaos we are going through this year, 2017.

“When the odds were stacked against us - and there have been many times when the great experiment we call America could have and should have failed - did God intervene to save us?” That question, posed by authors Chris and Ted Stewart, is the foundation for this remarkable book. And the examples they cite provide compelling evidence that the hand of Providence has indeed preserved the United States of America on multiple occasions.

Among all the various figures in 19th century America who left controversial legacies, it is hard to find one as influential as Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism, and the Latter-Day Saint movement. Revered as a prophet on the level of Moses by some, reviled as a perpetrator of large-scale fraud by others, what everyone can agree on is that Joseph Smith founded a religious movement that played a crucial role in the settlement of the West, especially in Utah.

During the mid-19th century, a quarter of a million travelers - men, women, and children - followed the "road across the plains" to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle - the second installment of Will Bagley's sweeping Overland West series - captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences.