Contingent Citizens

Spencer W. McBride is Historian and Documentary Editor at the Joseph Smith Papers, and is author of Pulpit and Nation. Follow him on X @SpencerWMcBride. Brent M. Rogers is Associate Managing Historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, and the author of Unpopular Sovereignty. Follow him on X @brentrogers2121. Keith A. Erekson is an author, teacher, and public historian who serves as director of the Church History Library. Follow him @KeithAErekson.

Introduction: Not Exceptional, Typical, or Americanized: The Latter-day Saint Experience with American Politics

Part I: Authority and Mobilization

1. "Some Little Necromancy": Politics, Religion, and the Mormons, 1829-1838

2. "Many Think This Is a Hoax": The Newspaper Response to Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential Campagin

3. Precarious Protestant Democracy: Mormon and Catholic Conceptions of Democratic Rule in the 1840s

4. "The Woman's Movement Has Discovered a New Enemy—the Mormon Church": Church Mobilization against the ERA and the NOW's Countermobilization in Utah

Part II: Power and Sovereignty

5. "The Way of the Transgressor is Hard": The Black Hawk and Mormon Wars in the Construction of Illinois Political Culture

6. "Like a Swarm of Locusts": Perceptions of Mormon Geopolitical Power in a Non-US West, 1844-1848

7. "In the Style of an Independent Soverign": Mid Nineteenth-Century Mormom Martial Law Proclamations in American Political Culture

8. Political Perceptions of Mormon Polygamy and the Struggle for Utah Statehood, 1847-1896

9. A Snake in the Sugar: Magazines, the Hardwick Committee, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1910-1911

Part III: Unity and Nationalism

10. "Rather Than Recognize This Wretched Imposture": Edward Everett, Rational Religion, and the Territory of Utah/Deseret

11. Ambiguous Allegiances and Divided Sovereignty: Mormons and Other Uncertain Americans in Nineteenth-Century North America

12. Mormons at Midcentury: "Crushed Politically, Curtailed Economically," but Winning "Universal Respect for Their Devotion and Achievements"

13. The Historic Conflicts of Our Time: Ezra Taft Benson and Twentieth-Century Media Representations of Latter-day Saints