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Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
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About This Book
Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park recreates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois. There, under the charismatic leadership of Joseph Smith, they founded Nauvoo, which shimmered briefly—but Smith's challenge to democratic traditions, as well as his new doctrine of polygamy, would bring about its fall. His wife Emma, rarely written about, opposed him, but the greater threat came from without: in 1844, a mob murdered Joseph, precipitating the Mormon trek to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows that far from being outsiders, the Mormons were representative of their era in their distrust of democracy and their attempt to forge a sovereign society of their own.
Reviews
"A perceptive study of a religion that has become a dominant force in American society."
"A welcome contribution to American religious and political history."
"Park's book is a compelling history, built from contemporaneous accounts and from the previously unreleased minutes of the Council of Fifty, a governing body of sorts that Smith convened in Nauvoo, Illinois, when he was feeling besieged by his enemies and anticipating the Second Coming of Christ ..."
"Park adeptly describes [Joseph] Smith's cautious acceptance of female authority on the frontier and Brigham Young's reactionary rejection of it ..."
"He fashions a dense, exciting, and absorbing narrative of the most consequential and dramatic movement to dissent against and secede from the Constitutional republic before the Civil War."
"In this enjoyable and fastidiously researched work, Park...entertainingly establishes this little-known Mormon settlement's proper place within the formative years of the Illinois and Missouri frontier."
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