Item Detail
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25774
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Book
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English
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Gutjahr, Paul
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The Book of Mormon : A Biography
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Princeton, NJ
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Princeton University Press
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2012
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255
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Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr., was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the Book of Mormon , the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world.
Gutjahr looks at how the Book of Mormon emerged from the burned-over district of upstate New York, where revivalist preachers, missionaries, and spiritual entrepreneurs of every stripe vied for the loyalty of settlers desperate to scratch a living from the land. He examines how a book that has long been the subject of ridicule--Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print"--has more than 150 million copies in print in more than a hundred languages worldwide. Gutjahr shows how Smith's influential book launched one of the fastest growing new religions on the planet, and has featured in everything from comic books and action figures to feature-length films and an award-winning Broadway musical. -
18
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"A Very Fine Azteck Manuscript" : Latter-day Saint Readings of Codex Boturini
"Idle and Slothful Strange Stories" : Book of Mormon Origins and the Historical Record
'Learned' and 'Unlearned' Reading in The Book of Mormon
Arno Schmidt among Comic Commentators on the Book of Mormon
Becoming a People of the Books : Toward an Understanding of Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord
Breaching the Wall: Ezra Taft Benson on Church and State
Camelot's Crucible : The Historiographic Context for Refiner's Fire
Et Incarnatus Est : The Imperative for Book of Mormon Historicity
Ezra Taft Benson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Emergence of a Conspiracy Culture within the Mormon Church
Mexicans, Tourism, and Book of Mormon Geography
Out of Obscurity : Mormonism Since 1945
Small Means, Great Things
Some Textual Changes for a Scholarly Study of the Book of Mormon
Teaching The Book of Mormon at the University of Vermont : An Interview with Elizabeth Fenton by Joseph Spencer
The Book of Mormon and Its Redaction of the King James New Testament : A Further Evaluation of the Interaction between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon
The Brief History and Perpetually Exciting Future of Mormon Literary Studies
The Mormon Church and Blacks : A Documentary History
The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism