This thesis is a biography of Joseph Smith Sr., first patriarch to the Church and father of the illustrious Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. The overall purpose of this treatise is of a four-fold nature. First, it proposes to reveal the kind of personality and character he possessed. Second, it intends to present a near complete and accurate account of his deeds and experiences. Third, it hopes to relate him to the historical period in which he lived. And fourth, by fulfilling the three purposes named, it will attempt to evaluate the assertions that have been frequently made that the Prophet Joseph came from an ignorant, shiftless, and unworthy family. All of this can be done only to a limited extent, because of the small amount that has been written about Joseph Smith, Sr. In organizing the research of this thesis I have attempted to accomplish my desired purposes by giving an overall evaluation of Father Smith's life from both favorable and unfavorable sources; this is followed with the formative influences that helped to shape his personality and character; then is given the part he and his family played in the restoration of the true Gospel and the service he rendered as a member of the true church; added to this are the trials and tribulations he witnessed and suffered for the faith he had in the divine mission of his son; circumstances of his death and contributions he made conclude the treatise. With this information, it is hoped that in judging Joseph Smith Sr., one may more fully take into account these influences that surrounded him and place oneself in a position to look at things from his point of view and thereby form at least a partially correct estimate of his character.

This study is an ethnohistorical examination of Indian religious responses to contact with Euroamericans on the Columbia Plateau, from 1600 to 1850. Plateau natives understood their encounter with European civilization primarily as a momentous spiritual event, and sought new sources of spiritual power to cope with their rapidly changing world. White people seemed to the Indians to have an abundance of spirit power, and many native religious efforts were aimed at capturing some of this power for themselves. These efforts included the protohistoric Prophet Dance, the syncretic "Columbian Religion" of the fur trade era, and the initial enthusiastic response to the first Christian missionaries on the Plateau. Each of these attempts was marked by great enthusiasm at first, and each was abandoned with bitter disappointment as the material condition of the natives worsened. By 1850, most Indians had abandoned the idea that the spirit power of the white people could ever be accessed by themselves, and new religious impulses took the form of nativist movements which sought to purge the natives of white influences.;Because both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries were active on the Plateau, I also compare the conversion efforts of the two faiths. to native eyes, the cultural flexibility, language skills, impressive ceremonies, and superior organizational structure of the Catholics compared favorably to the stem and incomprehensible doctrines of the Protestants. But in both cases most Indians accepted Christian doctrines only as a supplement, and not as a replacement of native beliefs. True converts proved rare before the reservation period.

Nauvoo, Illinois was the setting for two important social experiments in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons, made this city their headquarters of their rapidly expanding church from 1838 until 1846. Only three years after the departure of the Mormons, a group of Frenchmen calling themselves Icarians came to the same spot to realize a system of communal living and brotherhood that lasted in Nauvoo until 1856. While several studies have been devoted to these groups, as yet none have combined a study of the two communities who shared the same space.;This study focuses on the physical communities as envisioned by their leaders and as constructed and inhabited by the members of each group. In "reading" the city each community constructed at Nauvoo, we can understand their unique utopian agendas and how those were realized or compromised in the everyday living out of each groups' individual utopian vision. I offer one perspective, grounded in an interpretation of the cultural landscape of Nauvoo, which examines only a few of the numerous aspects of Mormon and Icarian society, including commitment mechanisms, ideological centers, leadership and authority, gender and conflict. This study seeks to compare the two communities at Nauvoo in ways that will not only elucidate their agendas and experiences, but will help shed light on the nature and experiences of utopian communities in general.

During the 17th and 18th century a number of Jews settled on the English island of Barbados and the Dutch island of St. Eustatius. The Jews on both islands erected synagogues and a number of key structures essential for a practicing religious community. Although they had strong connections that spanned across geo-political boundaries, the synagogue compounds on each island became key places for the creation and maintenance of a Jewish community. I argue that these synagogue compounds represented diasporic places that must be understood through a tri-partite model that explores the relationships between the Jewish community and its hostland, other dispersed Jewish communities, and the homeland. Furthermore, during the early modern period, these compounds were "heterotopias" within the colonial landscape. Heterotopias, as places of alternative ordering, speak to the constructions of social and cultural difference. For the Jews, the synagogue compounds provided them a chance to create a place founded on their cultural values and ideals within the Christian controlled spaces of both islands. Alternatively, for the Christian communities on the islands, the synagogue compounds highlighted how the Jewish community had different loyalties and values than they did. In exploring the ways that these places served as heterotopias, and for how long they were sites of alternative ordering, this dissertation demonstrates the fundamental role that places play in the formation and maintenance of diasporic communities and the dynamic relationship between spaces, places, and identities in the early modern period.

This dissertation is a biography of James McGready (c.1760-1817), a Presbyterian revivalist minister who lived and worked primarily in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana. He is best known as the Father of the Great Revival, an evangelical revival that spread throughout the southeastern United States between 1800 and 1805, and the creator of the camp meeting, which soon became an institutional part of American revivalism. Historians have generally described McGready as an innovator in matters of doctrine and revivalist methodology. This study argues that McGready is better understood as a traditionalist. This interpretation follows several recent works that have outlined a Scottish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian revivalist tradition dating from the 1620s.;The study traces McGready's educational background, outlines a variety of his theological positions, describes his intense homiletical style, and details his professional career. Research revealed that McGready was educated in several small Presbyterian-run schools that had direct links to the Presbyterian revivalism mentioned above. In doctrine, an examination of such varied topics as the process of conversion, limited atonement and predestination, and millennialism, showed McGready to be a firm Presbyterian Calvinist at every turn. In his homiletical style McGready followed a one hundred and fifty year old pattern of preaching known as the plain style and avoided the unstructured, extemporaneous preaching increasingly favored by revivalists in the nineteenth century. During his professional career, and especially during the Cumberland controversy of 1805-1809, McGready sided with the mainline church and eschewed those with schismatic inclinations.;The reinterpretation of McGready as a traditionalist casts doubt on much of the historiography of American revivalism. Historians have generally argued that revivalism arose in America and especially on the frontier. Understanding McGready, one of the foremost revivalists of the period, as a traditionalist tends to undermine that position. Additionally, this work re-emphasizes the transference of European forms to the New World, even past the American Revolution. Finally, McGready's professional struggles point up the remarkable fluidity in American religion during the early national period.

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This study was made for the purpose of determining the causes, course, nature, and effects of the "Great Reformation" that spread quickly throughout the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the latter part of 1856 and the first months of 1857.

In the first chapter, the underlying argument of the thesis indicates that Smith was very familiar with the Bible. His written work that reflects the scriptural nature of the Bible and is today canonized by Mormons is argued that it "extends the Bible's text and fills [many of] its [doctrinal] silences." A complete reading of this thesis could make some readers think that the doctrine of a plurality of Gods is integral to the sense of the Bible and a novel explanation for the existence of the universe. The second chapter indicates that many have grappled with the summary doctrine of the Mormon Godhead, the plurality of Gods teaching, as taught by Joseph Smith (1805-1844) in last weeks of his life. This doctrine was accepted by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) during the lifetime of those who knew Joseph Smith personally. First Presidency leader Franklin Richards championed the teaching in his writings. Church president John Taylor is quoted supporting the teaching. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, leaders felt uneasy with the plural Gods doctrine. The teaching began to be left out of the Mormon discourse and to this day is not mentioned in official writings, meetings, and conferences of the church. The final two chapters contain a detailed listing of and commentary on the concepts within Joseph Smith's unique explanation for the nature of God. While Smith said that he had ever been teaching the ideas relative to this final doctrine throughout his ministry, their summary presentation in two final discourses caused his listeners to find his teachings surprisingly unconventional. Two sermons contain Smith's teachings, the better known "King Follett Discourse" and the lessor known "Sermon in the Grove." While the first discourse is familiar to many, the complete doctrine cannot be understood without the supplementary information in the second lessor known sermon. In his last discourse, Smith taught of a hierarchal progression of Gods, indicating endless Gods. The nature of the Gods is for the Son to become a Father and produce a new God the Son, who will in turn become a Father. Smith explained, "Hence if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also?" Smith further paraphrased the concept by saying, "where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son?"

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