56 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

rather than for polemical motives. The next most-cited book about polygamy is Brodie’s No Man. The third is a relatively new player in the field: Thomas Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930.26 Alexander opens a new line of inquiry discussing the political and social changes in the Church after it denounced polygamy. It was during this period that the Church overcame its complicated relationship with the United States, and members instead sought to be seen and known as patriots and contributors of the growing national power.

Other important contributions to the study of polygamy and early Mormonism are Kathryn M. Daynes’ More Wives than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 and Sarah Barringer Gordon’s The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America.27 Kathleen Flake lays the groundwork for 20 th-century work in Mormonism and politics in her book The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle.28 Flake explores the debate over Reed Smoot, a practicing polygamist and elected senator. Additionally, Brian C. Hales’s three-volume work Joseph Smith’s Polygamy is the most up-to-date source on Smith’s concept and practice of plural marriage.29 Hales also published Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto, documenting the history of polygamy after the LDS Church banned it, including the rise of the schismatic group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.30 The most recent contribution to polygamy in Mormon studies is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870.31 Ulrich uses diaries, letters, and other primary sources to tell the story of polygamy from the perspectives of the women living it in 19 th-century Utah.

Outside of the biographies of prominent LDS leaders and the subject of polygamy, LDS theology—particularly its growth over time—and the general Utah period of the 19 th-century Church has also received significant attention. For the Utah period of 19 th-century Mormonism, Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom and Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition, both discussed above, are still the standouts in quality and citations. Spencer Fluhman’s A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America and Patrick Mason’s The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South also discuss public perception of Mormonism in the 19 th century.32

Aside from titles already mentioned above, several important books have scrutinized LDS theology. Thomas F. O’Dea published The Mormons in 1957, reviewing various religious practices of the Mormons and how they relate to, are contrasted by, or are otherwise contextualized by American Christianity.33 Sterling McMurrin continued this trajectory ten years later with The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion.34 Grant Underwood focused his work The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism on the millenarian theology of

26 Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

27 Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (Urbana: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 2001); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Studies in Legal History; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

28 Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

29 Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3 vols. (Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2013).

30 Brian C. Hales, Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations after the Manifesto (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006).

31 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).

32 J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Cha-pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Patrick Q. Mason, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormon-ism in the Postbellum South (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

33 Thomas F. O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957).

34 Sterling M. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1965).