Description

From inside jacket:

In the "Danite Manifesto," the ultimatum drafted by Sidney Rigdon that demanded their eviction from Far West, Missouri, in June 1838, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, John Whitmer, William W. Phelps, and Lyman E. Johnson, important Mormon founders, were described by eighty-four prominent leaders of the Mormon Church as men, three of whom "united with a gang of counterfeiters, thieves, liars and blacklegs of the deepest dye, to deceive cheat and defraud the saints out of their property, by every stratagem which wickedness could invent ... " Among those five men were "vile enemies" guilty of "wanton abuse," promise breakers, practitioners of "iniquity," instigators of "vexatious lawsuits, villa[i]nous prosecutions" and "criminals." This historical study shall not be one-half so hostile in its judgments as Latter-day Saints then and now were and are in theirs - in doctrines and dogma indicting all denominations, creeds, professors, priests and dissenters. It will be no match for the grievances routinely pronounced against other Christians and the United States in Mormonism's 19th and 20th-century temples.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction: "We Only of All"

1. Millitant Saints
2. "Memories Are Made of This"
3. "Romancing the Stone": 1819 to 1827
4. From Sacred Grove to Bainbridge
5. Bainbridge
6. Suppression
7. Making Magic Meld
8. The First First Vision
9. The Golden Plates
10. What Is the Book of Mormon?
11. Echoes of Ethan: View of the Hebrews Parallels
12. Echoes of James: The Book of Mormon and the King James Bible
13. "[W]e Face Grave Difficulties . . .": Historical Pretensions
14. "[I]t is . . . not a real history of a real people . . ."
15. "To God it is charged in its entirety."
16. The Jaredites of Tuscany
17. Spiritual Allegory?

Appendices

1. Abraham, Moses, Aaron and the Book of Abraham Papyri
2. Leaders in Missouri
3. B.H. Roberts Selections: Comments on Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, Reproduced by George D. Smith
4. Letter to Bishop Darrell L. Brooks from F. Michael Watson (Secretary to the First Presidency)

Bibliography
Index