Category: Joseph Smith

Emma Smith’s legal battles over Joseph’s estate stemmed from a desperate struggle for her family’s financial survival rather than a dramatic feud with Brigham Young. Joseph Smith’s assets were deeply tangled between personal and Church property, which triggered a crisis that was exacerbated for Emma by nineteenth-century coverture laws that stripped women of property rights. To protect her children, Emma clashed with Church agents like William Clayton and Almon Babbitt, ultimately losing her Nauvoo land claims to a federal steamboat debt. In this interview, Jeffrey Mahas untangles the surprising antagonists and tragic financial losses that fractured Emma’s relationship with the Utah Saints.

Twenty years after writing Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman says his biography of Joseph Smith met a pressing need and still largely stands, though he would now give far more space to plural marriage, especially Sarah Ann Whitney. He recalls the book’s unexpected reception, marvels at Joseph’s reinvisioning of heaven and reinstatement of temple worship, and concedes he missed later allegations like attempted murder. In this interview, Richard Bushman looks back on Rough Stone Rolling, now seeing Joseph as even more inventive than he thought—and more revolutionary than we recognize.

Historian John Turner’s new biography of Joseph Smith portrays the Prophet as charismatic, flawed, and relentlessly dynamic. His conclusions often differ from those in Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, offering a new perspective. Turner approaches Joseph’s spiritual claims with scholarly caution, adopting different stances based on his interpretation of the evidence. He writes there is “little reason to doubt” that Joseph saw the Lord in the First Vision, yet personally concludes that the gold plates weren’t real. In this interview, Turner reflects on Smith’s life—from the Prophet’s unifying vision of Zion to the divisive impact of polygamy.