Mark Twain once derided the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." Long and complicated, written in the language of the King James version of the Bible, it boggles the minds of many. Yet it is unquestionably one of the most influential books ever written. With over 140 million copies in print, it is a central text of one of the largest and fastest-growing faiths in the world. And, Grant Hardy shows, it's far from the coma-inducing doorstop caricatured by Twain. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Hardy offers the first comprehensive analysis of the work's narrative structure in its 180 year history. Unlike virtually all other recent world scriptures, the Book of Mormon presents itself as an integrated narrative rather than a series of doctrinal expositions, moral injunctions, or devotional hymns. Hardy takes readers through its characters, events, and ideas, as he explores the story and its messages. He identifies the book's literary techniques, such as characterization, embedded documents, allusions, and parallel narratives. Whether Joseph Smith is regarded as author or translator, it's noteworthy that he never speaks in his own voice; rather, he mediates nearly everything through the narrators Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Hardy shows how each has a distinctive voice, and all are woven into an integral whole. As with any scripture, the contending views of the Book of Mormon can seem irreconcilable. For believers, it is an actual historical document, transmitted from ancient America. For nonbelievers, it is the work of a nineteenth-century farmer from upstate New York. Hardy transcends this intractable conflict by offering a literary approach, one appropriate to both history and fiction. Regardless of whether readers are interested in American history, literature, comparative religion, or even salvation, he writes, the book can best be read if we examine the text on its own terms.

The Diné, or Navajo, have their own ways of knowing and being in the world, a cultural identity linked to their homelands through ancestral memory. The Earth Memory Compass traces this tradition as it is imparted from generation to generation, and as it has been transformed, and often obscured, by modern modes of education. An autoethnography of sorts, the book follows Farina King’s search for her own Diné identity as she investigates the interconnections among Navajo students, their people, and Diné Bikéyah—or Navajo lands—across the twentieth century. In her exploration of how historical changes in education have reshaped Diné identity and community, King draws on the insights of ethnohistory, cultural history, and Navajo language. At the center of her study is the Diné idea of the Four Directions, in which each of the cardinal directions takes its meaning from a sacred mountain and its accompanying element: East, for instance, is Sis Naajiní (Blanca Peak) and white shell; West, Dook’o’oosłííd (San Francisco Peaks) and abalone; North, Dibé Nitsaa (Hesperus Peak) and black jet; South, Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) and turquoise. King elaborates on the meanings and teachings of the mountains and directions throughout her book to illuminate how Navajos have embedded memories in landmarks to serve as a compass for their people—a compass threatened by the dislocation and disconnection of Diné students from their land, communities, and Navajo ways of learning. Critical to this story is how inextricably Indigenous education and experience is intertwined with American dynamics of power and history. As environmental catastrophes and struggles over resources sever the connections among peoplehood, land, and water, King’s book holds out hope that the teachings, guidance, and knowledge of an earth memory compass still have the power to bring the people and the earth together.

The story of the creation of the Book of Mormon has been told many times, and often ridiculed. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon presents and examines the primary sources surrounding the origin of the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most successful new religion of modern times. The scores of documents transcribed and annotated in this book include family histories, journal entries, letters, affidavits, reminiscences, interviews, newspaper articles, and book extracts, as well as revelations dictated in the name of God. From these texts emerges the captivating story of what happened (and what was believed or rumored to have happened) between September 1823-when the seventeen-year-old farm boy Joseph Smith announced that an angel of God had directed him to an ancient book inscribed on gold plates-and March 1830, when the Book of Mormon was first published. By compiling for the first time a substantial collection of both first- and secondhand accounts relevant to the inception of the divine revelation-or clever fraud-that launched a new world religion, A Documentary History makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing field of Mormon Studies.

Winner of the Special Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association Excavating Mormon Pasts assembles sixteen knowledgeable scholars from both LDS and the Community of Christ traditions who have long participated skillfully in this dialogue. It presents their insightful and sometimes incisive surveys of where the New Mormon History has come from and which fields remain unexplored. It is both a vital reference work and a stimulating picture of the New Mormon History in the early twenty-first century.

Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories. Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion. The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

Mormonism arose in early 19th century New York and has fired the imaginations of its devotees, critics, and students ever since. Some intellectuals and academics read Mormonism as the product of economic change wrought by the Erie Canal in the Burned-over District of western New York State and upper north-eastern Ohio. Others read Mormonism as an authoritarian reaction to Jacksonian democracy. Finally, some, including most of those who became Mormons in the early 19th century and most of those who are believing Mormons today, read Mormonism as the intervention of God in human history. This book engages with Mormon Studies from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the end of the 20th century. It covers those who fought over Mormonism's truth or falsity, on those who tried to understand Mormonism as a religious and sociological phenomenon, and on those who explored the history of Mormonism from a more dispassionate perspective. It concludes with an exploration of the culture war that erupted as Mormon Studies professionalized particularly after the 1960s.

"Gayle V. Fischer has produced a terrifically useful volume that no research library should be without." —The Journal of American History " . . . an indispensable resource to finding material on women's history throughout the world." —Journal of World History " . . . the work is recommended for its currency, depth of coverage, and scope." —Ethnic Forum As part of its mission to disseminate feminist scholarship and serve as the journal of record for the new area of women's history, the Journal of Women's History began a compilation of periodical literature dealing with women's history. This volume is drawn from more than 750 journals and includes material published from 1980 through 1990. There are forty subject categories and numerous subcategories. The guide lists more than 5,500 articles; all are extensively cross-listed.

From the Mormon Church's public announcement of its sanction of polygamy in 1852 until its formal decision to abandon the practice in 1890, people on both sides of the "Mormon question" debated central questions of constitutional law. Did principles of religious freedom and local self-government protect Mormons' claim to a distinct, religiously based legal order? Or was polygamy, as its opponents claimed, a new form of slavery--this time for white women in Utah? And did constitutional principles dictate that democracy and true liberty were founded on separation of church and state? As Sarah Barringer Gordon shows, the answers to these questions finally yielded an apparent victory for antipolygamists in the late nineteenth century, but only after decades of argument, litigation, and open conflict. Victory came at a price; as attention and national resources poured into Utah in the late 1870s and 1880s, antipolygamists turned more and more to coercion and punishment in the name of freedom. They also left a legacy in constitutional law and political theory that still governs our treatment of religious life: Americans are free to believe, but they may well not be free to act on their beliefs.