BYU ScholarsArchive

Article Title

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom By Spender McBride

Authors

Jordan T. Watkins

Keywords

Joseph Smith for President, Church history, Joseph Smith, Spender McBride, Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo

Abstract

In Joseph Smith for President, Spencer McBride provides an illuminating and reader-friendly account of Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign. McBride, who is a scholar of American religious and political history and an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, firmly situates the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within antebellum contexts. In doing so, he contributes to a body of scholarship that examines the early Saints’ experiences in ways that shed light on and correct assumptions about American historical developments. In one recent example, which addresses some of the same themes, Benjamin E. Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo (New York: Liveright, 2020) describes the Saints’ unique political, legal, and economic responses to a culture that had failed them and, in doing so, underscores the unsettled nature of democracy in antebellum America. Similarly, McBride’s study challenges popular narratives that assert the universal enjoyment of religious freedom by showing that states’ rights doctrine shaped the government’s unresponsiveness to the Saints’ petitions.

Recommended Citation

Watkins, Jordan T. (2022) "Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom By Spender McBride," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 61: Iss. 3, Article 17.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol61/iss3/17