Gary James Bergera

Review: A Private Revelation William Victor Smith. Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation

Review: Priesthood Power Jonathan A. Stapley. The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology download

Review: The History that Dares Speak Its Name J. Seth Anderson. LGBT Salt Lake

Seth Anderson’s slim book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s multi-volume Images of Modern America photographic series, is much more than an important new contribution to Utah and LDS history. It is a revelation— a surprising, unexpected…

The Orson Pratt-Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict Within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868

Brigham Young and Orson Pratt are both regarded as valiant leaders during the first generation of the restored Church. Both worked mightily in the missionary field and showed themselves stalwart defenders of the faith. Yet…

Grey Matters

Last fall a new publication appeared at Brigham Young University, “an independent student weekly,” The Seventh East Press. Its first stated reason for going into business was that “[t]here is no publication that puts in…

Orson Pratt: Prolific Pamphleteer

The most prolific and perhaps most influential early Mormon pamphleteer was Orson Pratt. From his conversion in 1830 to his death in 1881, he authored over thirty works on both religious and scientific topics. Influential…

What You Leave Behind: Six Years at the MTC

Even now, nearly eleven years later, I can still see his face—shocked, fearful, and deeply pained. I’d been working for almost four months at the newly constructed, multi-million dollar Language Training Mission, as the Missionary…

God’s Hand in Mormon History | Richard O. Cowan, The Church in the Twentieth Century: The Impressive Story of the Advancing Kingdom

For Richard O. Cowan, a professor of LDS history at Brigham Young University specializing in twentieth-century Mormon ism, the history of the Mormon kingdom is not only the religious success story of the last 2,000…

A Strange Phenomena: Ernest L. Wilkinson, the LDS Church, and Utah Politics

For Ernest Leroy Wilkinson, successful Washington, D.C., lawyer and seventh president of Brigham Young University, campaign politics was a game he could never master. From his rowdy youth in Ogden, Utah’s notorious Hell’s Half-Acre district, where blind eyes turned to cock-fighting and bootlegging, he had been fascinated by the nature and use of power. By the time he was fifty, he had secured a string of hard-won national victories as a tenacious and intimidating legalist. But the lure of politics remained the one attraction, despite other professional and personal accomplishments, he could not resist.

B.H. Roberts’s Autobiography

Building Wilkinson’s University

During his twenty years from 1951 to 1971 as seventh president of BYU, Ernest L. Wilkinson molded the lackluster Provo school into a showplace of LDS educational values. “More than any other single cause,” his successor observed, “[Wilkinson’s] remarkable and relentless leadership … is the key to the present stature of Brigham Young University.”

Friendly History | Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise

Glen Leonard’s long-awaited history of Nauvoo is friendly history at its finest. It gently questions some deeply held beliefs about the Saints’ tumultuous sojourn at the fringes of western Illinois. The writing is read able…

The Earliest Eternal Sealing for Civilly Married Couples Living and Dead

During the early 1840S, founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith introduced members of his young church to the ordinances of baptism for the dead (1840), eternal marriage (1841), and eternal proxy marriage (1842). These ordinances, and the doctrine underpinning them, united Smith’s beliefs in obedience to divine law, the importance of mortality, and the eternal nature of the family.

Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-1844

Dialogue 38.3 (Spring 2004): 1–74
Bergera uses evidence from plural wives to show who some of the first polygamists were in the church.

“Rising above Principle”: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1953-61 Part 1

“Weak-Kneed Republicans and Socialist Democrats”: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1953-61

The Richard D. Poll and J. Kenneth Davies Cases: Politics and Religion at BYU during the Wilkinson Years