The Joseph Smith Papers project has been called the "lunar mission" of Mormon historical research. The Latter-day Saint archivist who started the vast undertaking has died, and historians are praising ...

In 2012, scholar John Turner published an award-winning biography of Brigham Young, a mountain of a man in Western Americana. But there remained a bigger fish to pursue, namely Joseph Smith, the ...

Somewhere along the six-hour horseback ride from Nauvoo to Carthage, Ill., where Joseph Smith was martyred in 1844, he shared with his small group of travel companions a foreboding that he would soon ...

(RNS) — ‘I think the evidence for Joseph’s polygamous sealings is pretty overwhelming,’ says historian John Turner, who has penned a new biography of Joseph Smith. (RNS) — When John Turner’s biography ...

Perhaps a true-to-life biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, can never be written. Smith’s claims to accessing the divine were too outlandish, his embrace of polygamy too ...