No Man Knows My History by Fawn M. Brodie

Hugh Nibley, in one of the first responses written to counter the arguments in Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, ( No Ma’am, That’s Not History, Bookcraft, 1946), defends all of the prophet’s actions as noble in character. Latter-day Saint historians never denied Smith’s responsibility for originating plural marriage but tried to explain his sexual antics as religious in origin. As misguided as this interpretation was because of its conservatism and inability to deal with a raft of Smith’s earlier indiscretions, it opened the door for the acceptance of more critical appraisals. Howard that viewed plural marriage as something that arose in Nauvoo as an historical accident which grew like topsy near and immediately after the death of Joseph Smith Jr. This only began to change in a fundamental way after the 1983 publication of an article by Reorganized Church Historian Richard P. Flanders was virtually shunned from the Reorganized Church after his book, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Illinois, 1965), appeared because his research showed that polygamy’s origins laid firmly at the feet of Joseph Smith. Brodie’s arguments, therefore, really set off adherents to the church.

Instead, it had been the innovation of Brigham Young and his lieutenants, and was evidence of their apostasy. This set off other historians of Mormonism and they have been debating it ever since.įor instance, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), the second largest of the Mormon factions and my original place of faith, officially denied until the 1980s that Joseph Smith Jr., Mormonism’s founder, had originated the practice. 1971), she characterized the origin of polygamy as sexual licentiousness manifested as religious piety.

Brodie published her path-breaking biography of Joseph Smith in 1945, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Mormon Prophet (Knopf, 1945, rev. Assignment of responsibility for the origination of the doctrine, with all of its overtones of sexual impropriety, has been hotly contested.

The place of plural marriage in the early history of the Mormon church has been an important topic of analysis for historians since it first appeared in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the 1840s. It has also been one of the most contentious issues in Mormon history.

No Man Knows My History by Fawn M. Brodie