By D. Michael Quinn D. Michael Quinn is the award-winning author of many articles and books on Mormon history including Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Signature, 1998) and the upcoming The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power (Signature, 2016). Prologue I was recently asked1 to describe the background of the 97-page …
Tag: D. Michael Quinn
The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part III
Continued from Part II In May 1842, Joseph Smith reassembled a cadre of bodyguards, selecting primarily those with experience as Danites in Missouri. Former Danites such as Dimick B. Huntington, Daniel Carn, and Albert P. Rockwood began serving as Nauvoo’s “Night Watch.”[i]Previously a Danite captain, Rockwood had already been serving as “commander of my [Smith’s] …
The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part II
Continued from Part I One 24 September 1835, notwithstanding the absence of an external threat, Joseph Smith organized militarily in Kirtland. He proposed “by the voice of the Spirit of the Lord” to raise another Mormon army “to live or die on our own lands, which we have purchased in Jackson County, Missouri.” His manuscript …
The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part I
By D. Michael Quinn D. Michael Quinn is an independent scholar in Rancho Cucamonga, Southern California. His first ancestral Mormon mother, Lydia Bilyeu Workman, died in Nauvoo on 30 September 1845, just days after she was burned out of her farmhouse by mobs. Her five youngest children were aged six to eighteen. It is extremely …
Notes to D. Michael Quinn’s: “The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism” Part II
100. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, 138, 144-52. While Anderson, “Clarifications of Bogg’s [sic] `Order’ and Joseph Smith’s Constitutionalism” acknowledges that the Boggs extermination order responded to what Anderson calls “the hot skirmish at Crooked River” (45), he emphasizes the “unfounded rumors” (45), “the upcoming fictitious attack on the county seat” (46), the …
Notes for D. Michael Quinn’s: “The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism” Part I
1. Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, eds., Social Norms (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). 2. Richard Maxwell Brown, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: …