Book Review: The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South

Keywords

Anti-Mormonism, Postbellum South, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Abstract

In readable, compelling prose, Patrick Mason provides scholars with a new angle of vision on early Mormonism. Despite a profusion of books on the faith, no previous author has done justice to Mormonism’s nineteenth-century southern experience. And though Mormon studies has recently tilted towards intellectual and cultural history, Mason keeps his analysis largely fixed on the social history themes that once defined the field. In Mason’s telling, southern anti-Mormonism resonated with national calls for polygamy’s suppression, but also featured regional variations that illuminate southern culture and Mormonism alike. Linking southern antipolygamy with broader anxieties about gender and race, Mason effectively sets anti-Mormon vitriol and violence in context. Indeed, southern violence, which made the section’s postbellum antiMormonism distinctive, is in turn made comprehensible when set against southern traditions of vigilantism.

Original Publication Citation

The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South, by Patrick Q. Mason, in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 4 (May 2013): 151-52.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2013-5

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/6387

Publisher

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions

Language

English

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS