Review: Benjamin E. Park. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Authors

Christopher Childers

Keywords

Mormonism, Nauvoo, community, frontier, republic

Abstract

Benjamin E. Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo integrates social, cultural, and political history to explain how the Mormon movement sought to build a community of believers on the western frontier and how the experiment at Nauvoo ultimately failed. This experiment, a radical reinvention of Christianity based on the revelations of a charismatic religious figure—Joseph Smith—and the building of a community of like-minded believers, reveals much about the history of the early American republic. Kingdom of Nauvoo shows how Smith’s church evolved in the context of early nineteenth-century America and how the structure of early American society struggled to deal with movements like Mormonism.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Childers, Christopher (2022) "Review: Benjamin E. Park. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. New York: Liveright, 2020.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 23.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/23