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George Q. Cannon is generally acknowledged as second only to Brigham Young as the most visible leader of Mormonism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. He became Young’s protégé and was an influential first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for almost twenty-five years, serving with presidents Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow. Known as the “spokesman for the kingdom,” Cannon was the central political figure of the church, not only serving as Utah territory’s delegate to Congress for ten years but also as chief political advisor and long-term editor of the Deseret News. Cannon helped shape doctrine, church governance, and administration during a period of significant change, defending and promulgating plural marriage both before and after the 1890 Manifesto. He was at the center of business life in Salt Lake City, serving as president of the largest publishing house, banks, a railroad, mining companies, electric companies, and other businesses. Though Cannon was loved and revered by his people, controversy sometimes touched his life and family. 

Plural marriage in the Nauvoo era of LDS Church history has long been a fascinating subject. To understand it fully requires one to look at it from the perspective of the man who introduced it, but just as crucial is a dive into the lives of the women he married, all who have their stories to tell. In his 1997 award-winning study, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, Todd Compton focused on the thirty-three women who he could demonstrate that Smith married, providing life stories of many who were well-known and others who have been largely forgotten. In his new work, In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents, Compton returns to his subject and provides the raw materials that helped him create his original study, writings composed by the women themselves. 

This volume includes many autobiographical writings, diaries, and letters, with Compton providing annotations and introductory material that illuminates these crucial primary sources. This allows readers to take their understanding of this unique group of women to a new level and to drive home that fact that their lives go far beyond the Nauvoo experiment that forever links them to Mormonism’s founding prophet. 

Winner of the 2021 Best International Book Award from the Mormon History Association

In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.’s murder in 1844, his following splintered, and some allied themselves with a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly unwelcome in the Midwest. He had instructed Wight to take a small band of church members from Wisconsin to establish a Texas colony that would prepare the ground for a mass migration of the membership. Having received these orders directly from Smith, Wight did not believe the former’s death changed their significance. If anything, he felt all the more responsible for fulfilling what he believed was a prophet’s intention.

Antagonism with Brigham Young and the other LDS apostles grew, and Wight refused to join with them or move to their new gathering place in Utah. He and his small congregation pursued their own destiny, becoming an interesting component of the Texas frontier, where they had a significant economic role as early millers and cowboys and a political one as a buffer with the Comanches. Their social and religious practices shared many of the idiosyncracies of the larger Mormon sect, including polygamous marriages, temple rites, and economic cooperatives. Wight was a charismatic but authoritarian and increasingly odd figure, in part because of chemical addictions. His death in 1858 while leading his shrinking number of followers on yet one more migration brought an effective end to his independent church.

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power reveals insights into the complex history of prostitution in Salt Lake City. After the transcontinental railroad opened Utah to large-scale emigration and market capitalism, hundreds of women in Salt Lake City began to sell sex for a living, and a few earned small fortunes. Businessmen and politicians developed a financial stake in prostitution, which was regulated by both Mormon and gentile officials.

Jeffrey Nichols examines how prostitution became a focal point in the moral contest between Mormons and gentiles and aided in the construction of gender systems, moral standards, and the city's physical and economic landscapes. Gentiles likened polygamy to prostitution and accused polygamous Mormons of violating Christian norms of family structure and sexual behavior. Defending their church and its ideals, Mormons blamed gentiles for introducing the sinful business of prostitution into their honorable city. Nichols traces the interplay of prostitution and reform from the 1890s, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began to move away from polygamy, to World War I, when Mormon and gentile moral codes converged at the expense of prostitutes. He also considers how the conflict over polygamy distinguished Salt Lake City from other cities struggling to abolish prostitution in the Progressive Era.

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
 

 In Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy historian Merina Smith explores the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, a development that unfolded amid scandal and resistance. Smith considers the ideological, historical, and even psychological elements of the process and captures the emotional and cultural detail of this exciting and volatile period in Mormon history. She illuminates the mystery of early adherents' acceptance of such a radical form of marriage in light of their dedication to the accepted monogamous marriage patterns of their day.

Navigating the intricate labyrinth of early Mormon plural marriage can be fascinating, frustrating, and often confusing. The essays in this volume venture into the depths of historical inquiry, presenting a diverse array of perspectives on the subject. Authored by a consortium of esteemed scholars and researchers in the field of Mormon studies, it addresses the nuanced intricacies of Joseph Smith’s involvement in plural marriage.

Delving into the core of this discourse, these experts meticulously analyze foundational documents, highlighting the complexities Joseph Smith faced in practicing plural marriage and shedding light on the legal aspects of polygamy in 1840s Illinois. It navigates lesser-known details of Smith’s proposals and relationships, including the enigmatic story of Fanny Alger.

Secret Covenants presents a balanced exploration. It critiques traditional portrayals, providing multiple viewpoints, such as the examination of Emma Smith’s vehement rejection of polygamy after her husband’s death, and an analysis of the societal impact on women within polygamous unions. Furthermore, the authors address evolving doctrinal debates triggered by the “Marriage Revelation” and its impact on Mormon philosophy and thought.

This anthology serves as a foundational resource for academic scholars, individuals interested in religious history, and anyone seeking to understand the many layers of Mormon plural marriage.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Best Book Award, 1993.

This meticulously documented, deeply engaging book represents a unique approach to Utah and Latter-day Saint history, drawing on previously untapped private letters and diaries of members of the large and widely known polygamist family of the prominent Latter-day Saint leader, Heber C. Kimball.

The story includes compelling accounts of Helen Kimball Whitney, who married Joseph Smith polygamously at fourteen and became, according to Emmeline B. Wells, “one of the best known and most estimable women of the Church,” and of her son Orson F. Whitney, who forswore his embrace of reincarnation only six years before his call as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another daughter, Alice Kimball Smith, married a man who was tracked to a brothel and arrested for armed robbery and assault in 1883, after which Alice turned to family friend and apostle Joseph F. Smith and became his fifth wife. Heber’s son, J. Golden Kimball, one of the most beloved and colorful personalities in Mormon and Utah history, is brought to life in another sketch. The Kimballs had to navigate the ticklish business of explaining or obfuscating polygamy to disapproving family in the East, including the extended claim by Heber’s wife Christeen to her New Jersey family that she had married a Mr. Chase monogamously. Two of Heber’s sons, both stake presidents, contemplated plural marriage in the first decade of the twentieth century, well after the church publicly disavowed the practice.

Additional light is shone on the now-defunct Latter-day Saint practices of adult adoptions and speaking in tongues, Mormon-settler relations with the Utes and Pahvants, the 1856 handcart rescue, the John Hyrum Koyle “Dream Mine,” the Jackson County, Missouri, Temple Lot suit of 1892, and federal pursuit of polygamists.

More than three hundred Latter-day Saint settlements were founded by LDS Church President Brigham Young. Colonization—often outside of Utah—continued under the next three LDS Church presidents, fueled by Utah’s overpopulation relative to its arable, productive land. In this book, John Gary Maxwell takes a detailed look at the Bighorn Basin colonization of 1900–1901, placing it in the political and socioeconomic climate of the time while examining whether the move to this out-of-the-way frontier was motivated in part by the desire to practice polygamy unnoticed.

The LDS Church officially abandoned polygamy in 1890, but evidence that the practice was still tolerated (if not officially sanctioned) by the church circulated widely, resulting in intense investigations by the U.S. Senate. In 1896 Abraham Owen Woodruff, a rising star in LDS leadership and an ardent believer in polygamy, was appointed to head the LDS Colonization Company. Maxwell explores whether under Woodruff’s leadership the Bighorn Basin colony was intended as a means to insure the secret survival of polygamy and if his untimely death in 1904, together with the excommunication of two equally dedicated proponents of polygamy—Apostles John Whitaker Taylor and Matthias Foss Cowley—led to its collapse.

Maxwell also details how Mormon settlers in Wyoming struggled with finance, irrigation, and farming and how they brought the same violence to indigenous peoples over land and other rights as did non-Mormons.

The 1900 Bighorn Basin colonization provides an early twentieth-century example of a Mormon syndicate operating at the intersection of religious conformity, polygamy, nepotism, kinship, corporate business ventures, wealth, and high priesthood status. Maxwell offers evidence that although in many ways the Bighorn Basin colonization failed, Owen Woodruff’s prophecy remains unbroken: “No year will ever pass, from now until the coming of the Savior, when children will not be born in plural marriage.”