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

by Benjamin E. Park Narrated by Bob Souer

Overview

An extraordinary story of faith and violence in nineteenth-century America, based on previously confidential documents from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.



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 re-creates 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.

Editorial Reviews

Ray Olson

"[Park] 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."

Daniel Walker Howe

"Benjamin E. Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo tells the story of the city the Mormons built in Illinois before crossing the plains to Utah. Making sound use of newly available documents, Park’s story exemplifies the new Mormon history at its best. The author demonstrates the importance of women—including the prophet’s first wife, Emma Smith—in the shaping of Mormon history."

The New Yorker - Casey Cep

"Park’s book is a compelling history, built from contemporaneous accounts and from the previously unreleased minutes of the Council of Fifty. . . . Park’s explication of them elevates Kingdom of Nauvoo from pure religious history to the realm of political theory. Park, an ambidextrous thinker, is equally sensitive to the danger the state can pose to religious minorities and to the danger that a religious institution can pose to the secular state. In his account, the early Mormons were a rowdy band of neo-Puritans who mounted a fundamental challenge to the democratic experiment. The tensions that they experienced—between the right to religious freedom and the limits of religious tolerance—still persist today."

Richard Bushman

"Benjamin E. Park creates a startling picture of Nauvoo, the church, and the nation that all historians of the period will have to grapple with."

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

"Mormon Nauvoo represents one of the most audacious and consequential religious experiments in US history. Using newly available sources from the men and women who staked their lives to build a new world and redeem the nation, Benjamin E. Park explores the singular interpretation of democracy and political power nourished briefly in the swampy soils of the Mississippi. This engaging study does not shy away from the controversies, the failures, and the deeply held faith that mark an astonishing moment in our past."

Annette Gordon-Reed

"Kingdom of Nauvoo is a fascinating account of Joseph Smith’s attempt to build a ‘beautiful city’ for adherents to the new religion he founded: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Benjamin E. Park’s meticulously researched and gracefully written work provides a rich picture, not only of early Mormonism, but of the Jacksonian era in which the movement was born."

Amy S. Greenberg

"Benjamin E. Park’s concise and engaging narrative of this Mormon ‘empire’ situates it firmly in the context of American political and social development, western expansion, and religious foment, in the process revealing the ways in which the early Church of Jesus Christ was shaped by the forces transforming the nation while also posing a challenge to America’s emerging democratic and capitalist order."

Library Journal

01/01/2020

According to Latter-day Saints teaching, Joseph Smith found the golden tablets that, in his translation, became the Book of Mormon, in New York State. In crisp prose and using newly accessible sources, Park (history, Sam Houston State Univ.; American Nationalisms) traces the development of the Latter-day Saints during their sojourn in Nauvoo, IL, where most of Smith's religious and political ideas came to fruition, including the doctrine of polygamy and his rejection of democracy in favor of a religious commonwealth with himself as leader. The violent death of Smith and his brother led to the departure of his followers on a trek that would take them to Salt Lake City. Park argues convincingly that, far from being radical outsiders, Smith and his congregation were representative of American society of the time, as he considers the role of women in the church and its relationship to African Americans. VERDICT A perceptive study of a religion that has become a dominant force in American society. This work will appeal to anyone interested in the often-contentious history of religion in America.—Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ

Kirkus Reviews

2019-10-08
Vigorous study of the early Mormon settlement in Illinois, linking its founding to a rising anti-democratic tradition.

Park (History/Sam Houston State Univ.; American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, 2018, etc.) joins the history of Mormonism—a term used throughout the book but one that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to be distancing itself from—to that of Puritanism as a breakaway political movement whose members "believed the nation had forgotten its true purpose and was in need of a return to divine values." In the case of the Mormons, that return involved a repudiation of the Constitution in favor of a document called the Council of Fifty, which "rejected America's democratic system as a failed experiment and sought to replace it with a theocratic kingdom." Thus the Kingdom of Nauvoo, on the Mississippi River, a place very different from the Utah in which the Mormons eventually took shelter. Persecuted by neighbors and officials for polygamy and sedition, the Mormon residents of Nauvoo—12,000 of them in 1844, by Park's reckoning—also suffered internal divisions, including a famed disagreement between Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his wife Emma over what she regarded to be widespread sexual impropriety. As a force meant to clean society of its evils, the Mormons attracted plenty of like-minded converts, including a handful of African Americans and Native Americans who were definitively second-class citizens in the new order. Park allows that the Mormons had a point to make and that they were not alone in protesting a democracy that had witnessed much impropriety itself since the days of the Revolution, including "legal precedents based on the flimsiest of judicial decisions and political traditions established in the wake of corrupt electoral bargains." The author effectively links the Mormon critique to other dissidents, including the states' rights advocates who would lead the secessionist movement and modern-day dissidents who "flagrantly challenge the political and legal system" and reject the nation's democratic precepts.

A welcome contribution to American religious and political history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176400892
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,189,254

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