Top Highlights

• No biographer, however, had enjoyed anything close to unfettered access to archival material because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would not give scholars access to documents that peered behind ecclesiastically sanctioned narratives of Mormon history.
• For a religious group amounting to only two percent of the U.S. population, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has achieved an outsized cultural relevance.
• After the founding prophet’s murder, Brigham Young gathered the largest portion of Smith’s followers under his leadership, held them together amid persecution and exile, and planted the Mormon kingdom in what became Utah.
• After their expulsion from Illinois, the Mormons staked their claim to approximately one-sixth of the western United States, making Brigham Young the greatest colonizer in American history.
• Like Smith, Brigham Young was an uneducated, rural man