The Story of the Mormons, from the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901

In an era when most writers要么 demonized or sanitized the Mormons, William Alexander Linn attempted something radical in 1902: an honest history. A journalist and son of a Methodist minister, Linn recognized that contemporary accounts of the Mormon movement were uniformly tainted by sensationalism or sectarian bias. He set out to document the faith's origins with journalistic rigor and surprising empathy, tracing Joseph Smith's emergence from frontier obscurity through the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the brutal persecution that drove its followers westward, and Brigham Young's establishment of Utah as a theocratic commonwealth. The result is a remarkable artifact: a historical narrative written when living memory still informed the account, yet filtered through an earnest desire for fairness. Linn doesn't excuse the controversial, including polygamy, but he insists on understanding it within its context of religious conviction and survival. For readers interested in American religious history, the trans-Mississippi migrations, or the construction of historical narrative itself, this book offers a window into how one turn-of-the-century writer wrestled with one of America's most contested religious movements.