The Mormon Expulsions in Frontier America: Exploring Regional and Cultural Influences In this session, Robert Briggs explores violence against the Mormons in the frontier settings of western Missouri and western Illinois. How similar was it to Lynch Law and Regulator-style violence once often found in rural settings where effective law enforcement and court systems were lacking? How well did it match patterns in England and the rest of America in terms of the cultural notion of “affairs of honor” and “honor violence”? Were the Mormon expulsions really that different from those we find throughout the histories of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries?

Robert H. Briggs