Peer-Reviewed articles • Understanding Mormonism 57

early Mormons in the context of other American religious traditions.35 One final important contribution is Charles R. Harrell’s This is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology.36

Works Covering the 20 th and 21 st Centuries

Scholarship concentrating on the last 100 years of LDS history and culture tends to fall into the following major categories: LDS Church growth, public perception of Mormons, race and the LDS Church, women’s studies, and interfaith dialogue. During the 20 th century, there was significant growth in Church membership reach-ing quickly the levels of one million, two million, and eventually ten million global marks in the latter half of the century. Gregory A. Prince’s and William Roberts Wright’s David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism tracks the shifts in Mormon leadership during the early period of this growth, including the consolidation of authority from radical pioneers in the wilderness to conservative capitalists in mainstream America.37 J.B. Haws’s Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception documents the American perceptions of the Church and its members as they increasingly found themselves in the cultural spotlight, including myths and common misconceptions.38

Due to the Church’s restriction on priesthood and temple ordinances for any persons of African descent until 1978, it goes without saying that the LDS church has had a complex history of race relations. The most-cited work in SMH regarding the subject of race is Armand L. Mauss’ All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage.39 More recently, W. Paul Reeve published his study of the Church and its complex relationship with ethnicity and race in Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.40 Reeve discusses the 19 th-century tactic used by non-Mormons to define LDS church members as non-white in an effort to justify their poor treatment and violence toward Mormons before the Utah period. The LDS Church responded through various means to demonstrate their own whiteness, including what would later be known as the priesthood ban. Another important work, Russell W. Stevenson’s For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, presents the story of LDS race relations and policies through documents and oral histories.41 Finally, Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape focuses on the relationship between the Mormon settlers of Utah and the Native Americans in the region.42 While some of these other studies on race and Mormonism touch on the Church’s cultural and theological connection to indigenous populations (particularly North and South American and Pacific Islanders), Farmer concentrates primarily upon tribes in the Utah basin and colonization under Brigham Young.43

There has been a recent burgeoning interest in Mormon women’s studies. Beginning with Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, most Mormon women’s studies volumes have been

35 Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

36 Charles B. Harrell, This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011).

37 Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005).

38 J. B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford; New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2013).

39 Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

40 W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

41 Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

42 Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

43 The Book of Mormon maintains that some of the ancestors of Native Americans were a group of trans-oceanic Jewish refugees who fled Jerusalem during the time of Nebuchadnezzar.