Item Detail
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25551
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33
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0
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English
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The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Signature Books
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616
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[2012 Mormon Historical Association Winner for Best Documentary Editing]
[2012 John Whitmer Historical Association winner for Best Book]Two incidents are particularly dramatic in this volume, thanks to the careful work of clerks who took the minutes, bringing to life some key moments in LDS history. One of the most memorable meetings of the city council occurred on June 10, 1844; the minutes capture the emotions as members debate whether to detroy the opposition newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor. The publisher of the paper, Sylvester Emmons, had been a councilman until his June 8 expulsion for having “lifted his hand against the municipality of God Almighty.” As the hawkish councilmen became increasingly agitated, they began shouting slogans, asking whether the others had the neve to do what was right and crush the newspaper. The answer was a sustained, raucous cheer.
Yes resounded from every quarter of the room,” the clerk, Willard Richards, wrote. “Are we offering … to take away the right[s] of anyone [by] this [action] [to]day?” one of the city councilmen, William Phelps, shouted. “No!!!” was the answer “from every quarter.” Should they also tear down the barn of newspaper editor Robert Foster? Yes! they said. By the time the meeting was over, the Nauvoo police, assisted by 100 soldiers of the Nauvoo Legion, had “tumbled the press and materials into the street and set fire to them, and demolished the machinery with a sledge-hammer.
Another gripping event occurred on September 8, 1844, when the high council gathered outdoors to accommodate large crowds for the trial of Sidney Rigdon of the First Presidency. A behind-the-scenes power struggle became evident as Brigham Young stepped forward to take control of the meeting, culminating in a request for a vote from the audience. Young asked everyone to “place themselves so that [he] could see them, so he would “know who goes for Sidney.” There followed a flurry of denunciations of various Church members who were summarily excommunicated by acclimation rather than by trial in a meeting lasting six hours.
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A Mean Conspirator or "The Noblest of Men" : William Marks's Expulsion from Nauvoo
"A Negro Preacher" : The Worlds of Elijah Ables
A Peace Gene Isolated : Joseph Smith III
Black Mormon : The Story of Elijah Ables
Brigham Young : Pioneer Prophet
Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839
Defender : The life of Daniel H. Wells
Faithful and Fearless : Major Howard Egan : Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West
Glorious in Persecution : Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839–1844
John C. Bennett and Joseph Smith's Polygamy : Addressing the Question of Reliability
Joseph Smith's Last Weeks : Insights from the Journal Entries of Alexander Neibaur
Joseph Smith's Polygamy
Judge Joseph Smith and the Expansion of the Legal Rights of Women : The Dana v. Brink Trial
King Follett : Revisiting His Death, Burial, and Funeral(s)
Latter-Day Prophets : Their Lives, Teachings, and Testimonies
"Marshaled and Disciplined for War" : A Documentary Chronology of Conflict in Hancock County, Illinois 1839-1845
Mormons and the Grand Jury in Hancock County, 1839-1845
Mormon Women's History : Beyond Biography
Mortal Enemies : Mormons and Missourians 1839-1844
Race and the Making of the Mormon People
Road to Martyrdom : Joseph Smith's Last Legal Cases
Runaway Wives, 1830-1860
Terrible Revolution : Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse
The Coronation of James J. Strang and the Making of Beaver Island Mormonism
The Council of Fifty Minutes and Latter Day Saint Studies on Succession
The Council of Fifty, Orson Hyde, and the “Last Charge”: A Re-evaluation
"The Doctors in This Region Don't Know Much" : Medicine and Obstetrics in Mormon Nauvoo
The Writings of Oliver H. Olney : Early Mormon Dissident; Would-be Reformer
The Writings of Oliver Olney : April 1842 to February 1843 — Nauvoo, Illinois
William B. Smith and the "Josephites"
William Smith's Patriarchal Blessings and Contested Authority in the Post-Martyrdom Church
Your Sister in the Gospel : The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon