In 2011 and 2014, our own Ben P. set out a theoretical Mormon history “canon” or “comprehensive exams list.” Here’s what he wrote in 2014: “It is designed as a template for a grad student’s theoretical comprehensive exam list (though I should again emphasize that I’d think it’d be a stupid idea for a grad student to dedicate a portion of a comprehensive exam merely to Mormonism). Thus, books need to cover a broad swath of topics, chronologies, and approaches in order to be inclusive, but they should also match a particular level of quality.”

With all of this indoor time and time to finish long-thought-of-but-not-written blog posts, I decided to try my hand at it. While Ben stuck to naming 25 books to orient one to the field, I went to 42 and wrote a list for those studying American history. I plan to write one for religious studies, but we will see what time I have to do that in future months.  

IMPORTANT: This reflects my own interests and biases. It is not definitive. If I didn’t include your book or your cousin’s best friend’s bowling coach’s book that doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. These are introductory books that set the table for future study in American history. Other titles may appear on other lists.

If you want to add something you have to remove something. I’d love to hear suggestions in the comments!

Broad Chronological Sweep

1. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985)
2. Jill Derr, Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992)
3. Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012)

I think these three books will orient readers to the longer story of Mormonism. Enough, at least, so that one can understand the primary chronological periods in Mormon history.

Origins

• Valeen Tippetts Avery and Linda King Newell, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, Second Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1994)
• Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

While one could look to other books for an overview of the period or of particular events, these two biographies work together to place a fine lens on early Mormonism and on the broader American culture in which it was founded. Also, when will we have another peer-reviewed biography of Emma Smith? John Turner is currently working on a new biography of Joseph Smith.

Plural Marriage

• B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)
• Kathryn Daynes, More Wives than One: The Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001)
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017)
• Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020)

This is an enormous topic; indeed, one that has dominated the field for years. If students wanted to go deeper into the topic there are a dozen fine choices, but I think these four give the best sense of the historiographies’ trajectory over the past 30ish years.

Race and Ethnicity

1. Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)
2. Edward L. Kimball, “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood,” BYU Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 5-78.
3. W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
4. Quincy Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)

Like polygamy, there are a dozen/dozens of quality peer-reviewed books and articles on race in Mormonism. I acknowledge the lack of sources on Latinx Mormonism and additional non-Black groups. What would you add?

Also, for those wondering, I think that Kimball’s article is the best overview of the racial restriction from Joseph Smith to Spencer W. Kimball. It synthesizes and summarizes Lester Bush’s seminal article with additional information leading to the LDS repeal of its temple and priesthood restriction.

Colonialism and Global Mormonism

1. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “Looking West: Mormonism and the Pacific World, in The Mormon History Association’s Tanner Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ed. by Dean L. May, Reid Larkin Neilson, Richard L. Bushman, Jan Shipps, Thomas G. Alexander (University of Illinois Press, 2006): 319-336.
2. Hokulani Aikau, A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai’i (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
3. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, ”The Oak and the Banyan: The ’Glocaliation’ of Mormon Studies,” Mormon Studies Review (2014): 70-79.
4. Amanda Hendrix Komoto, “Mahana, You Naked!”: Modesty, Sexuality, and Race in the Mormon Pacific,” in Patrick Q. Mason and  John G. Turner, eds., Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 173-197.
5. Julie K. Allen, Danish But Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850-1920 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017).
6. Gina Colvin, Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018)

There’s a lot here, but I also think that this is the most methodologically cutting-edge group in the subfield. Many scholars who wish to use Mormonism to contribute to fields of interest beyond Mormon Studies or American religious history will definitely find these sources essential to their research. Melissa Inouye’s is one of the best articles on Mormon Studies ever written.

Utah-Era, Pre-Statehood

• Leonard Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958)
• Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
• Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

I’m not sure that it means anything, but these are four of the books best known outside of Mormon Studies circles.

Americanization

• Thomas Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890-1830 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986)
• Armand Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)
• Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
• David Hall, A Faded Legacy: Amy Brown Lyman and Mormon Women’s Activism, 1872-1959 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015).
• Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)

Anyone working in American history and Mormonism will have to grapple with the Americanization thesis at some point. These books reveal Mormon studies’/history’s historiographical trajectory as well as any.

Postwar Mormonism

• Martha S. Bradley, Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Religious Rights (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005)
• Gregory Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005)
• Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

32. J.B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
33. Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)

There are a few promising dissertations on Mormonism after World War II, but these five balance a narrower view of Mormon history with broader concerns to American political and religious history.

Interdisciplinary Works

• Patrick Q. Mason, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)
• J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
• Christine Talbot, A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013)
• Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• David J. Howlett, Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014)

Folks using history to produce religious studies scholarship should start here. Again, like every other section, if someone wanted to dig deeper there are a dozen or more helpful texts.

Sacred Texts

•  Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Paul C. Gutjahr, The Book of Mormon: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)
• Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Janiece Johnson, “Becoming a People of the Books: Toward an Understanding of Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 1-43.

There’s a LOT more to do here, but these five works set the tone for studying Mormonism’s sacred texts as a part of American history.