Fawn Brodie's biography of the founding Mormon prophet has received both praise and condemnation since it's publication in 1945. In 1995, at a symposium to mark its fiftieth anniversary, several scholars gathered together to re-examine Brodie, her Joseph Smith biography and its continuing importance. Bringhurst has brought together many of the essays from that meeting.

The red rock country of southern Utah, though used for many things, has for more than a century been synonymous with livestock ranching. Federal ownership and management of public lands there have led generations of socially isolated ranchers to mistrust federal officials and exhibit outright hostility toward environmentalists intent on removing livestock from the range, culminating in fierce rhetoric over the future of the American West.

Today, the relatively few cattle ranchers who continue to operate in southern Utah are part of a complex political and social mix of peoples and interests, as Indigenous nations, environmentalists, politicians, and tourists all have differing positions on land use in the region. In Red Rock and Rawhide, Jerry D. Spangler and Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller provide the first comprehensive examination of the history of livestock grazing in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and surrounding areas, drawing on years of research to show how the culture and industry have changed and continue to evolve.

This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage.
 
The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments.
 
The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history.
 
Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group.
 
Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn