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.

In this enjoyable and fastidiously researched work, Park...entertainingly establishes this little-known Mormon settlement’s proper place within the formative years of the Illinois and Missouri frontier..

Read this book for a straightforward discussion of Joseph Smith’s polygamy using several largely ignored primary sources. In it, author Benjamin E. Park also draws out the tensions of minority rights versus majority rule in an early American fledgling democracy. Using the Mormon experiment as a case study, he explores boundaries of race, gender, and whiteness. After the first two chapters, I could hardly bring myself to put it down.

Vigorous study.