AlphaMormon Stories History Project
Thirteen of the hardest questions in Mormon history, each assembled the same way: who was involved, which texts establish the record, what happened and when, which moments turned out to be hinges, how each camp reads the church's part in it, and why any of it matters. Built on published sources, primary evidence first. Where the record is contested, you get the disagreement rather than somebody's resolution of it.
The story is the narrative essay, footnoted to the source list. Timeline flags the hinge events and names what is disputed about each. Key players describes each person's part in that topic only. Key sources is ranked by evidentiary weight. Why it matters gives each camp's reading separately, then the stakes.
Every source carries a perspective label — primary, official, faithful-apologetic, academic, critical — and commentary is reported camp by camp rather than blended into one voice. Where the evidence does not settle a question, the page says so instead of picking. How this was built →
Each source says whether the text is actually held in the corpus or only reached through quotation inside something else. Books the corpus lacks are named per topic. No Mormon Stories episode numbers appear yet — the transcript index has not been queried, and a guessed number is worse than none.
Roughly chronological. Each card opens that topic's story; the five views are tabbed across the top of every topic page.
Between 1827 and 1830 Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon, which he said he translated from gold plates delivered by an angel. Eleven other men signed statements that they saw or handled the plates, and Martin Harris mortgaged his farm to pay E. B. Grandin of Palmyra to print 5,000 copies. Almost every element of that account — the seer stone, the plates, the witnesses' experience, the book's antiquity — has been contested from 1830 onward, including by the Church's own Gospel Topics essays, which now describe a translation method most members were never taught.
Joseph Smith left at least four accounts of the theophany Latter-day Saints call the First Vision, written or dictated between 1832 and 1842, and contemporaries recorded several more. The accounts differ on his age, on whether he saw one personage or two, on what he went into the woods to ask, and on whether a religious revival prompted him. The Church now publishes all of them; how much the differences matter is the argument.
In July 1835 an antiquities dealer named Michael Chandler brought four Egyptian mummies and several papyrus rolls to Kirtland, Ohio, and members of the church bought them. Joseph Smith announced that one roll held the writings of Abraham, produced English text and an 'alphabet and grammar' of Egyptian with his scribes, and published the Book of Abraham with three engraved facsimiles in the Times and Seasons in 1842. Eleven fragments of the papyri resurfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966 and were transferred to the Church in 1967; Egyptologists identify them as ordinary funerary texts, and what that means for the Book of Abraham has been argued ever since.
Between the mid-1830s and his death in 1844, Joseph Smith was sealed to somewhere between about thirty and forty women, roughly a third of them teenagers and roughly a third of them already legally married to living men. The practice was kept secret, was repeatedly denied in public and in print while it was being lived, and was written down as a revelation only on 12 July 1843, now Doctrine and Covenants 132. Its exposure in the Nauvoo Expositor in June 1844 set off the chain of events that ended with Joseph and Hyrum Smith shot at Carthage.
Between 1833 and 1844 the Latter-day Saints were driven from three Missouri counties and finally from the state, and their founding prophet was murdered in an Illinois jail. In the same years Latter-day Saints organized a secret band called the Danites, burned and looted two Daviess County towns, and destroyed an opposition newspaper press in Nauvoo. This topic assembles the documents on both halves of that record and the very different readings historians have built from them.
Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage on 27 June 1844 without a public, unambiguous rule for who should follow him. He had instead left a scattering of designations, ordinations and hints — enough that at least eight different succession arguments could each claim some warrant from something he had said or done. Within two years the movement he founded had broken into a Utah-bound majority under the Quorum of the Twelve and a scatter of rival churches under Sidney Rigdon, James J. Strang, Lyman Wight, Alpheus Cutler, William Smith and others, with the Reorganization gathering around Joseph Smith III in 1860.
In August 1852 the church publicly announced plural marriage and read the 1843 revelation aloud for the first time. Four decades of preaching, prosecution and imprisonment followed, ending in Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto, which advised Latter-day Saints to contract no marriage forbidden by law. Plural marriages nonetheless continued with church authority until Joseph F. Smith's Second Manifesto of April 1904, issued in the middle of the Reed Smoot Senate hearings.
In September 1857, a militia of Latter-day Saint settlers in southern Utah, joined by some Southern Paiutes they had recruited, besieged a California-bound wagon company from Arkansas at a valley called Mountain Meadows. On 11 September the militia lured the emigrants out under a white flag and killed roughly 120 men, women and older children, sparing seventeen children thought too young to testify. For decades the crime was blamed on Indians; only John D. Lee was ever tried and executed for it.
For most of its history the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints barred men of Black African descent from ordination and barred Black members of both sexes from the temple. A few Black men were ordained under Joseph Smith; Brigham Young announced the restriction publicly in 1852; later presidents extended it to temple ordinances and defended it as doctrine. It ended on 1 June 1978, and in 2013 the Church disavowed every explanation that had been offered for it.
In September 1993 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated five writers and disfellowshipped a sixth, all in Utah, all charged with apostasy or conduct unbecoming a member. The six — Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, Paul Toscano, D. Michael Quinn and Lavina Fielding Anderson — had published on Mormon history, feminist theology and ecclesiastical authority. The month capped two decades of widening conflict between the institution and the scholars who wrote about it, and it reshaped what Latter-day Saints could safely say in print.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a communal law of consecration, fell back on a tithe, nearly went bankrupt in the 1890s, and rebuilt itself into one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the world. It published detailed annual accounts to its members from 1915 through 1959 and then stopped. Since a 2019 IRS whistleblower complaint and a 2023 SEC settlement, the size of its reserves is public in a way its leaders never chose.
Across eight decades the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved from treating homosexuality as a curable sickness and a sin near the top of the scale, through electric-shock aversion research at BYU and two decades of marriage-amendment campaigning, to a 2015 handbook policy that called members in same-sex marriages apostates and barred their children from baptism until eighteen — and then reversed that policy in April 2019. The doctrine on same-sex marriage did not change; the language, the therapy, the politics and the discipline did. What the corpus documents most fully is the gap between what leaders said they intended and what LGBTQ members say the teaching cost them.
Since 1995 a Latter-day Saint bishop who learns of child sexual abuse has been instructed to call a 24-hour Church help line, where legal advice is supplied by Kirton McConkie, the Church's outside counsel. An Associated Press investigation in August 2022 of a case in Bisbee, Arizona, reported that this routing had kept a father's confession from police for years, and the Church replied that its help line had been "seriously mischaracterized." The argument that followed runs through state clergy-penitent privilege law, the practice of one-on-one worthiness interviews with minors, and a body of civil litigation whose outcomes have gone both ways.
