The Bushmans Come to America story continues with this sequel, starting with a trek across the prairie from Pennsylvania to Illinois, where the Bushman family intended to settle in Nauvoo, the "City Beautiful," along the Mississippi River. Although their time in Nauvoo was cut short, they knew what to do, and they lived and worked alongside their friends, to help build a temple of God on earth.
Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.
John Henry Bushman married Barbara Trout in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1764. His grandson, Martin Bushman (1802-1870), was raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, joined the L.D.S. Church and came to Utah. He was married to Elizabeth Degen. Descendants lived in Utah, California, Arizona, Idaho, Alberta, and elsewhere.
Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations. An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling also brilliantly evaluates the prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and his cultural place in the modern world.
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. When Joseph Smith began to reveal and teach the doctrine of plural marriage in 1841, even stalwart members like Brigham Young were shocked and confused. In this thoughtful study, Smith argues that the secret introduction of plural marriage among the leadership coincided with an evolving public theology that provided a contextualizing religious narrative that persuaded believers to accept the principle. This fresh interpretation draws on diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources and is especially effective in its use of family narratives. It will be of great interest not only to scholars and the general public interested in Mormon history but in American history, religion, gender and sexuality, and the history of marriage and families.
Offering an assesment of the state-of-the-field of the study of NRMs, this book considers the analytical tools for the study of new or minority religions and draws on the perspectives of diverse academic disciplines. Its essays focus on individual groups in a variety of geographical settings and review the past of particular groups in order to extrapolate future developments. They cover new religions that have persisted well past the first generation, such as the Mormon Church, the Christian Scientists, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and groups with comparatively shorter histories such as various forms of contemporary Paganism, Soka Gakkai, and the Diamond Way Buddhist group.
With a revolution behind them, a continent before them, and the First Amendment protecting them, religio-sexual pioneers in antebellum America were free to strike out on their own, breaking with the orthodoxies of the past. Shakers followed the ascetic path; Oneida Perfectionists accepted sex as a gift from God; and Mormons redefined marriage in light of new religious revelations that also redefined God, humankind, spirit, and matter. Sex became a powerful way for each group to reinforce their sectarian identity as strangers in a strange land. Sex and Sects tells the story of these three religiously inspired sexual innovations in America: the celibate lifestyle of the Shakers, the Oneida Community’s system of controlled polyamory, and plural marriage as practiced by the Mormons. Stewart Davenport analyzes why these bold experiments rose and largely fell over the course of the nineteenth century within the confines of the new American republic. Moving beyond a social-scientific lens, Davenport traces for the first time their fascinating shared trajectory as they emerged, struggled, institutionalized, and declined in tandem—and sheds historical light on the way in which Americans have discussed, contested, and redefined the institutions of marriage and family both in our private lives and in the public realm.
