Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier​

Benjamin Park received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge and currently teaches American religious history at Sam Houston State University. His first book, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and was a finalist for the Sally and Morris Lasky Prize in Political History. His academic articles have appeared in over a dozen scholarly journals, including Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of the Early Republic, Church History, Early American Studies, Journal of American Studies, and Journal of Mormon History. He currently editing a textbook, A Companion to American Religious History, which will appear with Wiley-Blackwell in December 2020, and serves as co-editor of the academic journal Mormon Studies Review. His most recent book, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier, was published by W.W. Norton/Liveright in February, and has been featured in Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. He is currently working on a general survey of Mormonism in America, to be published by Norton.

Jenny Reeder earned her PhD in American History from George Mason University, where she studied American religious history, memory, and material culture. She has co-edited two books: At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women with the Church Historian's Press (2017) and Witness of Women: Firsthand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration with Deseret Book (2016). She participated in the 2019 Maxwell Institute's annual Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, focusing on Emma Smith and Doctrine and Covenants 25. She works as the nineteenth-century women's history specialist at the Church History Department in Salt Lake City, where she is currently working on a book on Emma Smith and a digital collection of discourses by Eliza R. Snow.