In the early morning hours of July 26, 1953, several hundred Arizona state officials and police officers moved into the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona, to serve warrants on thirty-six men and eighty-six women. Officials staging the raid believed they were rescuing the community’s 263 children from a life of bondage and immorality.

Kidnapped from that Land is the first book to bring together the story of the 1953 raid and two previous raids in 1935 and 1944. Martha Bradley tells the story with insight and compassion for the families that were fragmented by the arrests. She also deals with the complex legal issues that persist in both Arizona and Utah, where the practice of polygamy is a felony that is no longer prosecuted.

Kidnapped from that Land will appeal to those interested in the study of Mormon history, of polygamy, and of western regional and American social history.
 

     "A significant collection . . . that provides a depth and breadth
        of understanding reflective of the latest and best in Mormon history."
        -- Paul M. Edwards, author of Our Legacy of Faith: A Brief History
        of the RLDS
      Who were the Nauvoo Mormons? Were they Jacksonian Americans or did they
        embody some other weltanschaung? Why did this tiny Illinois town
        become such a protracted battleground for the Mormons and non-Mormons
        in the region? And what is the larger meaning of the Nauvoo experience
        for the various inheritors of the legacy of Joseph Smith, Jr.?
      Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited includes fourteen thoughtful
        explanations that represent the most insightful and imaginative work on
        Mormon Nauvoo published in the last thirty years. The range of topics
        includes the Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon press, the political kingdom of
        God, the opposition of non-Mormons, the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, and
        the meaning of Nauvoo for Mormons. The introduction provides a critique
        of Nauvoo scholarship, and a closing bibliographical essay analyzes the
        historical literature on the Mormon experience at Nauvoo.
 

To survive in an often disapproving external social world, the LDS Church has made many adaptive changes in belief, practice, and organization over time. Gordon and Gary Shepherd identify and elucidate these changes through statistical analysis of the rhetoric from General Conference proceedings in their book. The first edition of A Kingdom Transformed, published in 1984, covered the years 1830 to 1979. This new edition revises this earlier work and adds to it by examining the subsequent thirty years of LDS church rhetoric revealing what new trends have emerged and what old ones have continued. It retains the summary and analysis of data from the first 150 years of LDS Church history, but every chapter, including the narrative history of early Mormonism, has been thoroughly rewritten with updated theoretical and empirical support from contemporary research sources.

The first edition showed how early twentieth century LDS leaders were fairly liberal in mainstreaming church doctrines and social teaching, but by mid-twentieth century, as the church became more stable, accepted, and successful, church authorities reversed several earlier modifications and began emphasizing a stricter, more conservative theology that coincided with an increasingly conservative political orientation. The new book adds current issues of concern, such as the role of women in the church and international growth versus member retention. It also introduces a new conceptual framework for interpreting findings.  

The only temple completed by Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the Kirtland Temple in Kirtland, Ohio, receives 30,000 Mormon pilgrims every year. Though the site is sacred to all Mormons, the temple’s religious significance and the space itself are contested by rival Mormon dominations: its owner, the relatively liberal Community of Christ, and the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
 
David J. Howlett sets the biography of Kirtland Temple against the backdrop of religious rivalry. The two sides have long contested the temple's ownership, purpose, and significance in both the courts and Mormon literature. Yet members of each denomination have occasionally cooperated to establish periods of co-worship, host joint tours, and create friendships. Howlett uses the temple to build a model for understanding what he calls parallel pilgrimage--the set of dynamics of disagreement and alliance by religious rivals at a shared sacred site. At the same time, he illuminates social and intellectual changes in the two main branches of Mormonism since the 1830s, providing a much-needed history of the lesser-known Community of Christ.