Item Detail
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29116
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2
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0
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English
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Mormonism in American History
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Utah Historical Quarterly
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1959
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27
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Utah Historical Society
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59-77
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Mormonism assumes an unusual identity
with American history, all the more because it is as native to the
United States as Indian corn and the buffalo nickel. We have to specify
an American Judaism or an American Catholicism, but Mormonism is
American by birth, although the United States was long reluctant to
accept the honor. In its New England origins, its Utopian experiments
and reforms, its westward drive, and its early expansion to Europe
resulting in a great program of immigration and settlement, nineteenth-century
Mormonism expressed prominent traits and tendencies that
were already shaping American society. It was not simply a colorful
reflection of the times; it was a dynamic reworking of the diverse elements
of American culture. Mormonism is unique primarily in the
way it combined these elements, in what it added or neglected, making
it now a perfect epitome of its time and place, and now a puzzling contradiction.