Contingent Citizens

Spencer W. McBride is Historian and Documentary Editor at the Joseph Smith Papers, and is author of Pulpit and Nation. Follow him on X @SpencerWMcBride.Brent M. Rogers is Associate Managing Historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, and the author of Unpopular Sovereignty. Follow him on X @brentrogers2121.Keith A. Erekson is an author, teacher, and public historian who serves as director of the Church History Library. Follow him @KeithAErekson.

• Introduction: Not Exceptional, Typical, or Americanized: The Latter-day Saint Experience with American PoliticsPart I: Authority and Mobilization1. "Some Little Necromancy": Politics, Religion, and the Mormons, 1829-18382. "Many Think This Is a Hoax": The Newspaper Response to Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential Campagin3. Precarious Protestant Democracy: Mormon and Catholic Conceptions of Democratic Rule in the 1840s4. "The Woman's Movement Has Discovered a New Enemy—the Mormon Church": Church Mobilization against the ERA and the NOW's Countermobilization in UtahPart II: Power and Sovereignty5. "The Way of the Transgressor is Hard": The Black Hawk and Mormon Wars in the Construction of Illinois Political Culture6. "Like a Swarm of Locusts": Perceptions of Mormon Geopolitical Power in a Non-US West, 1844-18487. "In the Style of an Independent Soverign": Mid Nineteenth-Century Mormom Martial Law Proclamations in American Political Culture8. Political Perceptions of Mormon Polygamy and the Struggle for Utah Statehood, 1847-18969. A Snake in the Sugar: Magazines, the Hardwick Committee, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1910-1911Part III: Unity and Nationalism10. "Rather Than Recognize This Wretched Imposture": Edward Everett, Rational Religion, and the Territory of Utah/Deseret11. Ambiguous Allegiances and Divided Sovereignty: Mormons and Other Uncertain Americans in Nineteenth-Century North America12. Mormons at Midcentury: "Crushed Politically, Curtailed Economically," but Winning "Universal Respect for Their Devotion and Achievements"13. The Historic Conflicts of Our Time: Ezra Taft Benson and Twentieth-Century Media Representations of Latter-day Saints

Contingent Citizens is an excellent addition to the canon of Mormon studies and its transcending beyond the Americanization model sets the contours of future scholarly investigation of Latter-day Saint political history for the next generation.(Journal of Mormon History) This new volume, Contingent Citizens: Shifting Perceptions of Latter-day Saints in American Political Culture, is a reminder that the Mormon Moment of the early twenty-first century was only one of many times that Mormons have been in the national spotlight—in both negative and positive ways. [T]he message of Contingent Citizens is that the Latter-day Saint experience should be understood as an illustrative example of a religious group deeply embedded in American society and politics.(Journal of Church and State) [T]his new collection edited by Spencer W. McBride, Brent M. Rogers, and Keith A. Erekson is dazzling in its insights and the depth and cogency of its analysis. I am also struck by the consistency across these essays of imaginative, adroit archival research and highly original analysis, as well as by the thematic harmony across several overlapping political concepts, giving the volume a coherence that is unusual in edited collections of this size. For many reasons, this book is an excellent addition to the general historiography of American religion.(Mormon Studies Review)