Joseph Smith, Sarah Ann Whitney, and the Familial Dynamics of Nauvoo Polygamy

[The great people at the Joseph Smith Papers Project keep rolling out newly digitized documents onto the website. Last year they uploaded several new caches from 1843. Included in that bunch was a blessing for Sarah Ann Whitney, a plural wife of Joseph Smith, dated March 23 and written in Smith’s own hand. Very few…

Publisher News for the Nauvoo Book

So, while I’m still two months away from American Nationalisms finally hitting the shelves, I’ve been working away on my second book. It’s tentatively titled Democracy’s Discontents: A Story of Politics, Polygamy, and Power in Mormon Nauvoo, and it is a microhistory of the Mormon city-state that was settled on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River…

Review: Tom Cutterham, GENTLEMEN REVOLUTIONARIES

The American Revolution was founded upon elite gentlemen willing to stake their reputation on a political gamble. That’s what Tom Cutterham argues in his new book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton UP, 2017), anyway. The British Empire featured countless men who were eager to climb the ranks of nobility–class…