[Page 1]Review of Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York City: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 336 pages. $28.95 (hardback).

Abstract: Benjamin Park recently wrote a substantive revisionist history of Nauvoo, Illinois, the one-time Church capital under the leadership of Joseph Smith, Jr. This article serves as a critical review of Park’s work. Congratulating the author for placing this well-known Latter-day Saint story within the larger Jacksonian American democratic context, as well as for utilizing a great many primary sources hardly used before, Richard Bennett in this critical review assesses both the strengths and the weaknesses of this important new book. While complimenting Park for his significant contributions on politics, women, and race in Nauvoo, Bennett nonetheless finds much to criticize in what he sees as a unidimensional, highly political study that disregards many previous studies of Nauvoo and fails to address many other critically important facets of the city’s life and history from its inception in 1839 until the Saints’ departure in 1846.

Having heard conflicting reports about Benjamin Park’s most recent study of Nauvoo before receiving an invitation from Interpreter to review it, I eagerly awaited obtaining my own review copy. And being as vain, perhaps, as the next reviewer, I immediately flipped through its many footnotes (unfortunately, there is no bibliography) to see how many of my own books and articles were referenced, if not relied upon then at least as counterpoint to the author’s points of view. I was saddened to see that not one of my published works over the past three decades on so many aspects of Nauvoo history made the grade — including articles on the Nauvoo Charter, the Council of Fifty, the Battle [Page 2]of Nauvoo, the ensuing Nauvoo Poor Camps, the sale and burning of the Nauvoo Temple, “Lamanism” and Alpheus Cutler’s dream of aligning with the Native Americans — not even my book-length studies of the exodus from Nauvoo in February 1846. It was one of those humbling moments in every scholar’s life when you realize that your works have not left nearly so deep an impression as perhaps you once thought they would have. Such is to be expected in the up-and-down, give-and-take life of the scholar.

Crestfallen, I then began to look more deeply to see if the same fate had befallen some of my contemporaries, especially those of us who tend to see Nauvoo through a much wider lens than Park has chosen to do. It didn’t take long to see that earlier generations of scholars I deeply respect suffered much the same fate, including the likes of B. H. Roberts, T. Edgar Lyon, Glen M. Leonard, Leonard J. Arrington, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Brian Hales, and many others. Hardly if at all mentioned, their works have obviously fallen out of favor in Ben Park’s new and revisionist political history of Nauvoo. For instance, Glen Leonard’s and T. Edgar Lyon’s collaborative 828-page magnum opus on the topic — Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise1 — is quickly dispatched in the author’s view as an “exhaustive social, if devotional, history of Nauvoo directed to faithful Mormons” (288n6) as if hardly worth the read. It was then I realized I had to go back to the beginning and re-read this new study as well as review earlier Nauvoo studies to gauge as fairly as possible its strengths and weaknesses. Failing to engage so much of previous scholarship,