In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan dive into the 1860s, the decade when Mormon polygamy reached its statistical and cultural peak. Drawing on census data, diaries, oral histories, and the sharp observations of British explorer Richard Francis Burton, they examine how plural marriage became woven into Utah’s theology, politics, economics, and daily life. From Brigham …
Podcast: Sunstone Mormon History Podcast
There’s the Mormon history you do know … and the Mormon history you don’t. Join Lindsay Hansen Park (Year of Polygamy) and historian Bryan Buchanan as they dig into all aspects of Mormonism’s astonishing 200-year past—uncovering the little-known stories that chronicle how a six-person church grew into a multi-billion-dollar religion.
Episode 164: Mormon Mail and the Pony Express
Before texts, tracking numbers, and two-day shipping, a letter could take months to cross the continent, assuming it arrived at all. In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan saddle up for the tangled story of Mormons, mail, freighting, and power in the American West, from Brigham Young’s ambitious Y.X. Company and the political chaos of the …
Episode 163: The Old Salt Lake Theatre
While Eastern theaters staged plays depicting Mormons as bloodthirsty polygamists, Brigham Young was building a Drury Lane replica in the Utah desert. It would go on to host Oscar Wilde, the Barrymore family across four generations, and Brigham Young’s own son performing in drag to packed houses. It was the most ambitious act of cultural …
Episode 162: Madam Pattirini Built Utah
What do Brigham Young’s flamboyant son, a legendary local gin, the University of Utah, the Huntsman Center, and a web of Mormon architecture all have in common? In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan follow one gloriously weird thread through Utah history, from Madam Pattirini, the stage persona of Brigham Morris Young, to the family empire …
Episode 161: Brave Little Book of Mormon
What happens when the Book of Mormon slips into the public domain and someone entirely outside the faith decides to publish it? In this episode of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast, Lindsay and Bryan trace the strange journey of an 1858 “unauthorized” edition, a scrappy little volume caught between evolving copyright law, religious rivalry, and …
Episode 160: The Heber J. Grant Journals—Fruits of a New Policy
Lindsay and Bryan are back in video form — and they’ve got a lot to talk about. The Church History Library just dropped a remarkable new digital resource: the Heber J. Grant journals, spanning more than sixty years of Mormon history and now available to casual readers and serious researchers alike. But the journals themselves …
Episode 159: Books of the Massacre
A long overdue Books of Mormons Report, and we’re making it an episode. Lindsay and Bryan trace how the Mountain Meadows Massacre got written about, argued over, buried, resurrected, and fought over again, from Judge John Cradlebaugh and Major James Carleton’s early investigations, to decades of institutional silence and PR cleanup, to Juanita Brooks’ landmark …
Episode 158: Dan Neal on Polygamy, Murder and Mayhem in Idaho
When family secrets meet frontier justice: A murder that shattered a Mormon community Join Lindsay Hansen Park and journalist Daniel H. Neal for a conversation about his new book No Forgiveness—a true crime story that’s part family reckoning, part historical excavation. On a summer morning in 1911, two polygamous Mormon neighbors stood in an Idaho …
Episode 157: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 5
The story shifts from tension to bloodshed. September 1857, Mountain Meadows, southern Utah where a wagon train of emigrant families was betrayed under a flag of truce and massacred by Mormon settlers and their allies. In this episode, we unravel the deception, the chain of command, and the sacred language that cloaked an atrocity in …
Episode 156: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 4
In September 1857, southern Utah became the stage for one of the darkest tragedies in American frontier history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This was no spontaneous clash but a calculated act of religious extremism and territorial paranoia that left 120 emigrants from the Baker-Fancher party dead, while Mormon leaders shifted blame onto Southern Paiute tribes. …