Item Detail
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25850
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21
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0
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English
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The Missouri Mormon Experience
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Columbia, MO
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University of Missouri Press
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187
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The Mormon presence in nineteenth-century Missouri was uneasy at best and at times flared into violence fed by misunderstanding and suspicion. By the end of 1838, blood was shed, and Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that Mormons were to be exterminated or driven from the state.
The Missouri persecutions greatly shaped Mormon faith and culture; this book reexamines Mormon-Missourian history within the sociocultural context of its time. The contributors to this volume unearth the challenges and assumptions on both sides of the conflict, as well as the cultural baggage that dictated how their actions and responses played on each other.
Shortly after Joseph Smith proclaimed Jackson County the site of the New Jerusalem, Mormon settlers began moving to western Missouri, and by 1833 they made up a third of the county s population. Mormons and Missourians did not mix well. The new settlers were relocated to Caldwell County, but tensions still escalated, leading to the three-month Mormon War in 1838 capped by the Haun s Mill Massacre, now a seminal event in Mormon history.
These nine essays explain why Missouri had an important place in the theology of 1830s Mormonism and was envisioned as the site of a grand temple. The essays also look at interpretations of the massacre, the response of Columbia s more moderate citizens to imprisoned church leaders (suggesting that the conflict could have been avoided if Smith had instead chosen Columbia as his new Zion), and Mormon migration through the state over the thirty years following their expulsion.
Although few Missourians today are aware of this history, many Mormons continue to be suspicious of the state despite the eventual rescinding of Governor Boggs's order. By depicting the Missouri-Mormon conflict as the result of a particularly volatile blend of cultural and social causes, this book takes a step toward understanding the motivations behind the conflict and sheds new light on the state of religious tolerance in frontier America. -
A Contested Promised Land : Mormons, Slaveholders, and the Disputed Vision for Settlement of Western Missouri
A House Full of Females : Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870
Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith
Black Mormon : The Story of Elijah Ables
Joseph F. Smith: Reflections on the Man and His Times
Joseph Smith’s Kingdom of God : The Council of Fifty and the Mormon Challenge to American Democratic Politics
Kingdom of Nauvoo : The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
Make Yourselves Gods : Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
Making Friends in Missouri : Telling the Steamboat Saluda Story and its Aftermath
Parallel Paths : LDS General Conference and Mormon History
Parley P. Pratt : The Apostle Paul of Mormonism
Real Native Genius :
How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians
"Some Savage Tribe" : Race, Legal Violence, and the Mormon War of 1838
The Book of Moses: From the Ancient of Days to the Latter Days
The Bullion, Beck, and Champion Mining Company and the Redemption of Zion
The Doctrinal and Commitment Functions of Patriarchal Blessings in Early Mormon Development
The Establishment and Redemption of Zion
The History and Acquisition of the Original Temple Lot Property in Independence, Jackson County, Missouri
The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism
The Past and Future of the Temple Lot in Independence, Jackson County, Missouri
The Temple Lot at Independence, Jackson County, Missouri