Beginning in the 1830s, at least thirty-three women married Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. These were passionate relationships which also had some longevity, except in cases such as that of two young sisters, one of whom was discovered by Joseph’s first wife, Emma, in a locked bedroom with the prophet. Emma remained a steadfast opponent of polygamy throughout her life.The majority of Smith’s wives were younger than he, and one-third were between fourteen and twenty years o...

Plural marriage in the Nauvoo era of LDS Church history has long been a fascinating subject. To understand it fully requires one to look at it from the perspective of the man who introduced it, but just as crucial is a dive into the lives of the women he married, all who have their stories to tell. In his 1997 award-winning study, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, Todd Compton focused on the thirty-three women who he could demonstrate that Smith married, prov...

Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received ...

A gripping account of the mob killing of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism“American Crucifixion paints a brilliant picture of religious experimentation, public intolerance, and the making of a martyr.”—Chicago TribuneOn June 27, 1844, in the dusty frontier town of Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith and three of his associates waited anxiously in a jail cell. The dynamic founding prophet of Mormonism no longer had a congregation to p...

In the early 1820s a young boy named Joseph Smith claimed that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him to found a new church. Thus began Mormonism, a faith that has grown to thirteen million members worldwide. The Mormon Contradiction: In Their Own Words offers the reader an insight into what the Mormon Church is really all about, including: Where the Book of Mormon really came from Joseph Smiths personal history and use of Occultism and Freemasonry The original accoun...

From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History,and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination.A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, ...

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. Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping...

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn New York craftsman whose impoverished life was electrified by the Mormon faith. Turner provides a fully realized portrait of this spiritual prophet, viewed by followers as a protector and by opponents as a heretic. His pioneering faith made a deep imprint on tens of thousands of lives in the American Mountain West.

The enduring saga of Mormonism is its great trek across the plains, and understanding that trek was the life work of Stanley B. Kimball, master of Mormon trails. This final work, a collaboration he began and which was completed after his death in 2003 by his photographer-writer wife, Violet, explores that movement westward as a social history, with the Mormons moving as “villages on wheels.”Set in the broader context of transcontinental migration to Oregon and California, the Mormon...

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 by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder of over 120 men, women, and c...

Anyone interested in Joseph Smith will be fascinated by Remembering Joseph, the most complete collection ever of stories from the Prophet's family, friends, acquaintances — even his enemies. Organized topically, the stories treat a wide variety of subjects: the character of Joseph Smith, the doctrines he taught, the gifts of the Spirit he enjoyed, important events in his life, and many others. A great number of these stories have not previously been published. A great resource on ...

When Joseph Smith entered Kirtland, Ohio, for the first time, he had only the year before established a church and brought forth a new book of scripture, the Book of Mormon. After moving the church and most of its members from western New York and establishing its headquarters at Kirtland—while simultaneously establishing his Zion in communities in Missouri—he oversaw a decade of both peace and prosperity and chaos and conflict.But just who was Joseph Smith? What motivated him? In ...