There’s the Mormon history you do know … and the Mormon history you don’t. Join Lindsay Hansen Park (Year of Polygamy) and historian Bryan Buchanan as they dig into all aspects of Mormonism’s astonishing 200-year past—uncovering the little-known stories that chronicle how a six-person church grew into a multi-billion-dollar religion.
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He dedicated Jerusalem for the return of the Jews, renamed Nevada’s oldest town, nearly became president of the LDS Church, and may have helped create one of Mormonism’s most enduring succession myths. This week, Lindsay Hansen Park and Bryan Buchanan trace the astonishing and contradictory life of Apostle Orson Hyde, from orphaned boy who walked …
On Friday the 13th, 1862, a thousand armed men surrounded a muddy little fort on the Weber River, where Joseph Morris and his followers waited for the Second Coming. What followed was a three-day siege, cannon fire, disputed murders, mass arrests, and one of the strangest, bloodiest, and least-known breakaway movements in Utah history. In …
In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan dive into the 1860s, the decade when Mormon polygamy reached its statistical and cultural peak. Drawing on census data, diaries, oral histories, and the sharp observations of British explorer Richard Francis Burton, they examine how plural marriage became woven into Utah’s theology, politics, economics, and daily life. From Brigham …
Before texts, tracking numbers, and two-day shipping, a letter could take months to cross the continent, assuming it arrived at all. In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan saddle up for the tangled story of Mormons, mail, freighting, and power in the American West, from Brigham Young’s ambitious Y.X. Company and the political chaos of the …
While Eastern theaters staged plays depicting Mormons as bloodthirsty polygamists, Brigham Young was building a Drury Lane replica in the Utah desert. It would go on to host Oscar Wilde, the Barrymore family across four generations, and Brigham Young’s own son performing in drag to packed houses. It was the most ambitious act of cultural …
What do Brigham Young’s flamboyant son, a legendary local gin, the University of Utah, the Huntsman Center, and a web of Mormon architecture all have in common? In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan follow one gloriously weird thread through Utah history, from Madam Pattirini, the stage persona of Brigham Morris Young, to the family empire …
What happens when the Book of Mormon slips into the public domain and someone entirely outside the faith decides to publish it? In this episode of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast, Lindsay and Bryan trace the strange journey of an 1858 “unauthorized” edition, a scrappy little volume caught between evolving copyright law, religious rivalry, and …
Lindsay and Bryan are back in video form — and they’ve got a lot to talk about. The Church History Library just dropped a remarkable new digital resource: the Heber J. Grant journals, spanning more than sixty years of Mormon history and now available to casual readers and serious researchers alike. But the journals themselves …
A long overdue Books of Mormons Report, and we’re making it an episode. Lindsay and Bryan trace how the Mountain Meadows Massacre got written about, argued over, buried, resurrected, and fought over again, from Judge John Cradlebaugh and Major James Carleton’s early investigations, to decades of institutional silence and PR cleanup, to Juanita Brooks’ landmark …
When family secrets meet frontier justice: A murder that shattered a Mormon community Join Lindsay Hansen Park and journalist Daniel H. Neal for a conversation about his new book No Forgiveness—a true crime story that’s part family reckoning, part historical excavation. On a summer morning in 1911, two polygamous Mormon neighbors stood in an Idaho …
