Published for the first time in their entirety, the personal diaries of Mormon founder Joseph Smith (1805-44) provide an unequaled view of this controversial American religious leader. Previous compilations of carefully selected and sometimes rewritten passages of Smith's diaries and journals do not capture the intensity of the present, unexpurgated edition.

Since polygamy was initially secret, Clayton spent much of his time putting out the fires of innuendo and discontent. He caught his first plural wife rendezvousing with her former fiancé; later, when she became pregnant, her mother--his unaware mother-in-law--was so overwrought that she attempted suicide.

Abraham H. Cannon was the fourth son of early Mormon insider, apostle, publisher and pioneer George Q. Cannon. Because of his father's prominence, he was introduced to the highest realms of Church and Utah territorial leadership at an early age--an advantage which set the stage for Abraham to make significant historical contributions himself. As a bonus to modern historians, his diaries flow like few others from the late nineteenth...

John Henry Smith had played an important role in church, state, and politics for nearly forty years.

Lund converted to Mormonism, immigrated to the United States, and became an apostle and later counselor to the LDS church president—also Salt Lake temple president and Church Historian. His diaries cover the tensions between Apostle Moses Thatcher and his colleagues; the rejection by the U.S. House of Representatives of Utah's Congressman, B. H. Roberts; the stormy hearings over whether to seat LDS apostle Reed Smoot in the U.S. Senate;...

In this collection of primary sources, editor Dan Vogel offers readers the pleasures and frustrations that greet professional historians. Raw and uncensored, all the documents upon which a history of Mormon origins could be based are here, with strengths and weaknesses inherent in any eyewitness account. They are colorful and detailed, opinionated and inconsistent. In tone they range from ultra-devotional to antagonistic. Yet each also contributes an important piece...

Unlike Oliver Cowdery's grandiloquence and Martin Harris's mercurial temperament, David Whitmer—third of Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon—was plain-spoken, reliable, and straight-forward, as one might expect from his Mennonite upbringing. Readers will notice the care he took to avoid exaggeration. "We did not touch nor handle the plates," he affirmed repeatedly. If he felt a reporter erred in detail or in conveying the overall spirit of the Three...

Today when we think of Joseph Smith as a young man, we tend to picture him in a Palmyra, New York, setting. He also spent three years in Harmony, Pennsylvania. When he first arrived there, he boarded with Isaac Hale and worked for Josiah Stowell. Later, after he married Hale's daughter Emma, he became a permanent resident and property owner. He also spent about six months across the border...

As historians continue to sort through the beginnings of Mormonism, Dan Vogel's comprehensive inventory of all relevant primary documents is an unparalleled achievement. In this first of a multi-volume series, Joseph Smith's family--Emma, Katharine, Lucy, Joseph Sr., William, and others--recount how they became convinced of his high calling, feeling "the spirit of God like a burning fire shut up in bones." These narratives are carefully presented in their...

Who else, besides Joseph Smith, saw the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated? Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses, said that he saw the holy record with his "spiritual eyes," that the plates were otherwise kept concealed in a wooden box, wrapped in a cloth, and that nobody saw them. The Eight Witnesses, according to Harris, hesitated to sign a written testimonial for the...