Home » Sunstone History Podcast

sunstone-history-podcastTransparency

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 gossip about their ancestors and 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. Episodes for this podcast are released every other week.

This podcast is heavily researched. For information on sources, and for additional reading for each episode's topic, click here.

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or stream episodes right here on Sunstone.org.

Episode 164: Mormon Mail and the Pony Express

May 8, 2026

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 …

Episode 163: The Old Salt Lake Theatre

April 21, 2026

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, …

Episode 162: Madam Pattirini Built Utah

April 2, 2026

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, …

Episode 161: Brave Little Book of Mormon

March 18, 2026

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 …

Episode 160: The Heber J. Grant Journals—Fruits of a New Policy

March 6, 2026

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 …

Episode 159: Books of the Massacre

February 11, 2026

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 …

Episode 158: Dan Neal on Polygamy, Murder and Mayhem in Idaho

December 1, 2025

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 …

Episode 157: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 5

October 29, 2025

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 …

Episode 156: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 4

October 3, 2025

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 …

Episode 155: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 3

September 17, 2025

Just when we thought we’d talked enough about disappointing Mormon men, George A. Smith pulls us back in. In this unflinching episode, we unpack how the so-called “Father of Southern …

About Our Hosts

Lindsay Hansen Park is host of the Year of Polygamy podcast and executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation. A single-mom of three kids by day, and nerd researcher by night, Lindsay lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where she interacts with hundreds of different restoration branches, Latter-day Saints and Mormon fundamentalists. Her adventures have led her to some of the most isolated fundamentalist compounds in the America West where she interacts with modern day outlaws, inlaws and everything in between. Her goal is to widen the conversation about common and shared heritages within the larger Mormon diaspora.

Lindsay
My Post

Bryan Buchanan works at Benchmark Books, surrounded by Mormon history. At night, he herds small children and works on umpteen book projects, some of which might even be published.