In the history of the West, Brigham Young is a star of the first magnitude, for no man shaped the history of the Great Basin more dramatically nor influenced the ultimate destiny of the Mormons…
This is a unique composition in the true sense of the word—there is not another with which it can be compared. Francis W. Holm, Sr., was reared in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…
This book has developed out of the author’s lifetime experiences in association with the two major Restoration Churches. Although he has spent most of his adult life as a member of the Reorganized Church of…
Doc and my father got up at 4 o’clock to light the fire, heat water on the Coleman stoves for washing and get the breakfast started, then woke the rest of us. Standing outside of…
Her songs—those that I remember—
Were of the flight and winter crossing,
The wagons and sick children,
“Sources of Mormon History in Illinois, 1839-48” at Southern Illinois University, is a collection of documents (most of which are on microfilm), which was assembled by Stanley B. Kimball, who also published an annotated catalog…
The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (here after referred to as the RLDS Church) was headquartered in the State of Illinois until 1882. To a greater degree than that of any…
Were a nineteenth-century Mormon to assess the current scholarly literature on the Mormons in Illinois, or on Mormon history in general for that matter, he would probably be perplexed. While compelled to admit that the…
Our understanding of the American past has been greatly enriched in recent years by studies which have made use of literary sources. Few works, for example, surpass the challenging insights and interpretations of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), William R. Taylor’s Cavalier and Yankee (1961), Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964). Such studies have proved to be so useful that some historians now concede that a review of the contemporary fiction is a fruitful, if not an indispensable, preliminary to the search for historical truth in any period.
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine, in a political frame of reference, the persistent question as to why the Mormons were so ferociously constrained from their attempt to establish at Nauvoo a society…