The Council of Fifty: What the Records Reveal about Mormon History. Edited by Matthew J. Grow and R. Eric Smith

When leaders of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (otherwise known as the LDS or Mormon Church) agreed in 2016 to publish the once-embargoed minutes of the secretive Council of Fifty, scholars welcomed the move toward greater transparency by the church. (Joseph Smith, the movement’s founding prophet, organized the Council of Fifty in Nauvoo, Illinois, as a sort of hybrid deliberative-advisory body that would ultimately bring to fruition Smith’s backward political fantasies of an American “theodemocracy.”) Seizing the moment, Matthew J. Grow and R. Eric Smith, employees in the LDS Church History Department, called on a small set of scholars to define the significance of the minutes, a project that resulted in the volume under review. A number of those scholars’ findings will no doubt upend some closely held beliefs of LDS adherents and historians alike regarding nineteenth-century Mormonism. Publication of the minutes, for instance, illuminates, more than ever before, the powerful separatist impulse in early Mormon political culture. The minutes also shed further light on the aims of Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential candidacy. It turns out Smith and the Council of Fifty (which managed his campaign) conceived of his run as more than a simple political protest: they really believed he could win.