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Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
69/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Benjamin E. Park
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
February 25, 2020
An account of Mormon founder Joseph Smith's construction of a new city for his followers on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois, Nauvoo, which at its height surpassed Chicago's population with 12,000 inhabitants. A university history professor, Park shows the ways in which Mormons were representative of their era, elevating 19th century Mormon history into the American mainstream.
What The Reviewers Say
The 2016 opening to historians of Mormon archives about Nauvoo enables Park to name names and assign dates to the events leading up to the Mormon cataclysm. He fashions a dense, exciting, and absorbing narrative of the most consequential and dramatic movement to dissent against and secede from the Constitutional republic before the Civil War..
In Kingdom of Nauvoo, historian Benjamin E. Park has a wild story to tell.
Park’s book is a compelling history, built from contemporaneous accounts and from the previously unreleased minutes of the Council of Fifty, a governing body of sorts that Smith convened in Nauvoo, Illinois, when he was feeling besieged by his enemies and anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.
In crisp prose...Park argues convincingly that, far from being radical outsiders, Smith and his congregation were representative of American society of the time.
