"Between the mid 1840s and late 1860s, around 5,000 Welsh people, inspired by the Mormon faith, ventured to start a new life in the United States...seeking their holy city in the West..."--back cover.

Traces the tragedy-marked 1856 journey of three thousand Mormons from Iowa to Utah, explaining how leader Brigham Young disregarded warnings and then convinced his followers that hardships and deaths were part of a higher plan.

The three volumes of My Own Pioneers together tell a remarkable story of the desperate pioneer struggles of four generations of the author’s family. Although the memorable historical journey begins seven generations ago, these three volumes of stories focus on four important pioneer generation. They are the culmination of fifteen years of painstaking research as the author carefully reconstructs her family’s pioneer struggles from before 1830 to 1918 using information from family records, journals, memoirs, histories and letters, supplemented by accounts from their pioneer companions, and by Church and other official records. Volume I tells about the author’s once prosperous pioneer families survived the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, then eventually relocated to join the newly founded Mormon Church. The stories tell how the pressure of mobs and mob wars eventually forced these families to abandon everything as they were driven from place to place, until they found themselves exiled on the western-most border of the United States—at the Missouri River—looking toward the wild and hostile West as their only refuge. Stories describe how dozens of family members were among the Mormon refugees who died by the hundreds at the Missouri River, of illness, starvation and exposure. Yet family members had managed to journey among Indians on the frontier to preach, and had sailed through nearly catastrophic ocean storms to preach in England. And despite much sorrow and hardship, this volume relates how five family members left their loved ones behind at the sickly Missouri River in order to march down the Old Santa Fe Trail in the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion to prove their loyalty to the government by helping to fight a war with Mexico.

The Welsh in Iowa is the history of the little known Welsh immigrant communities in the American Midwestern state of Iowa. Dr. Walley’s book identifies what made the Welsh unique as immigrants to North America, and as migrants and settlers in a land built on such groups. With research rooted in documentary evidence and supplemented with community and oral histories, The Welsh in Iowa preserves and examines Welsh culture as it was expressed in middle America by the farmers and coal miners who settled or passed through the prairie state as it grew to maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work seeks to not only document the Welsh immigrants who lived in Iowa, but to study the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group in a state known for its ethnic heritage.

Collection of essays and articles about the US Civil War, with a focus on, but not limited to, people who were either members or later became members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Topics include historical facts about actual events, people, landmarks, and stories; most of which are connected to the US Civil War.

Contains histories of some of the minorities in Utah.

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel is the first study to treat the history of claims to an Israelite identity as an ongoing historical phenomenon from biblical times to the present. By treating the Hebrew Bible's accounts of Israel as one of many efforts to construct an Israelite history, rather than source material for later legends, Andrew Tobolowsky brings a long-term comparative approach to biblical and nonbiblical “Israelite” histories. In the process, he sheds new light on how the structure of the twelve tribes tradition enables the creation of so many different visions of Israel, and generates new questions: How can we explain the enduring power of the myth of the twelve tribes of Israel? How does “becoming Israel” work, why has it proven so popular, and how did it change over time? Finally, what can the changing shape of Israel itself reveal about those who claimed it?

Collection of papers from the Iowa Mormon Trail Symposium held May 3-4, 1996 in Des Moines, Iowa. Examines the history of the Mormon Trail in Iowa, with special focus on topics such as Mormon women, the hardships of the Nauvoo Poor Camps, the social life and entertainment of the travelers, the temporary way stations of Garden Grove, Mt. Pisgah, and Kanesville, and the Mormon Battalion.