LDS Church

Nostalgia, idealism, and the policing of childhood.

Many faiths face conflicts over institutional control. In Latter-day Saints history, the episode around the ‘September Six’ is particularly memorable.

A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.

History and controversy in the architecture of the Latter-day Saints.

When the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for president, he wasn’t seeking further glory but a policy change in religious liberty.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis.

Miles Harvey on the life and times of James J. Strang.

The Mormon church is still grappling with a racial past.

The most ambitious social experiment in American history that until 1877, explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.

Visiting the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.

We're born with a hunger for connection with our ancestors – both biological and spiritual.

From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.

In "A Nation of Descendants," Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

Why three religious groups traded monogamy for celibacy, polygamy, and complex marriage.

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people.

A scholar of the history of race sets out on an exploration of his own family roots, and despite his better judgement, is moved by what he discovers.

San Bernardino, California's early success rested on a pair of seemingly incongruous forces: Mormonism and slavery.

From prehistoric caves, through Aztecs, Mormons, Beat poets, Jean-Paul Sartre and a British MP.

How stories of abuse in minority religious communities have influenced American culture.