Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier

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 consti...