Hyrum, in 1844. When the Nauvoo Charter was revoked, the militia no longer enjoyed legal status and assumed a distinctly different role in Mormon affairs until it was reconstituted after the Mormon emigration to Utah. --

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.

Who were the Nauvoo Mormons? Were they Jacksonian Americans or did they embody some other weltanschaung? Why did this tiny Illinois town become such a protracted battleground for the Mormons and non-Mormons in the region? And what is the larger meaning of the Nauvoo experience for the various inheritors of the legacy of Joseph Smith, Jr.? Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited includes fourteen thoughtful explanations that represent the most insightful and imaginative work on Mormon Nauvoo published in the last thirty years. The range of topics includes the Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon press, the political kingdom of God, the opposition of non-Mormons, the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, and the meaning of Nauvoo for Mormons. The introduction provides a critique of Nauvoo scholarship, and a closing bibliographical essay analyzes the historical literature on the Mormon experience at Nauvoo.

A history of what became a romantic legend about a martyred prophet, a lost city, and religious persecution, this volume tells the story of Nauvoo, the early Mormon Church, and the temporal life of Joseph Smith. Nauvoo (1839-46) was a critical period in Mormon history. The climax of Smith's career and the start of Brigham Young's, it was here that Utah really had it's beginnings and that the pattern of Mormon society in the West was laid. "...the quality and quantity of research is commendable... an excellent contribution to American mid-western history and to Mormoniana in general." -- Journal of American History

Carthage Conspiracy deals with the general problem of Mormon/non-Mormon conflict, as well as with the dramatic story of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and their alleged assassins. It places the infamous event at the Carthage jail (1846) and the subsequent murder-conspiracy trial in the context of Mormon and American legal history, and deals with the question of achieving justice when crimes are politically motivated and popularly supported.

"Volume 3 ... features primarily minutes of meetings, letters, and revelations but also includes city plats, priesthood licenses, a warrant, a deed, and an attempt to classify the scriptures by topic."--Page xvii.