Best Book Award — Mormon History Association Best Book Award — John Whitmer Historical Association More of Mormonism’s canonized revelations originated in or near Kirtland than any other place. Yet many of the events connected with those revelations and their 1830s historical context have faded over time.Barely twenty-five years after the first of these Ohio revelations, Brigham Young lamented in 1856: “These revelations, after a lapse of years, become mystified [sic] to those who were not personally acquainted with the circumstances at the time they were given.” He gloomily predicted that eventually the revelations “may be as mysterious to our children . . . as the revelations contained in the Old and New Testaments are to this generation.” Now, more than 150 years later, the distance between what Brigham Young and his Kirtland contemporaries considered common knowledge and our understanding of the same material today has widened into a sometimes daunting gap. Mark Staker narrows the chasm in Hearken, O Ye People by reconstructing the cultural experiences by which Kirtland’s Latter-day Saints made sense of the revelations Joseph Smith pronounced. This volume rebuilds that exciting decade using clues from numerous archives, privately held records, museum collections, and even the soil where early members planted corn and homes. From this vast array of sources he shapes a detailed narrative of weather, religious backgrounds, dialect differences, race relations, theological discussions, food preparation, frontier violence, astronomical phenomena, and myriad daily customs of nineteenth-century life. The result is a “from the ground up” experience that today’s Latter-day Saints can all but walk into and touch.

Using clues from numerous archives, privately held records, museum collections, and even the soil where early members planted corn and homes, the author reconstructs the cultural experiences by which Kirtland's Latter-day Saints made sense of the revelations Joseph Smith pronounced.

Celebrated global design firm Pentagram has produced a series of signature annual documents, known as Pentagram Papers, exclusively for clients and colleagues since 1975. On the occasion of the firm's 35-year anniversary, these quirky and influential Papers are collected here together for the first time. Each Paper explores a unique and curious topic of interest to the Pentagram designersMao buttons, the Savoy ballroom, rural Australian mailboxes, and the pop architecture of Wildwood, New Jersey, have all been featured subjects. Included here are not only in-depth reproductions and detailed discussion of the Papers' origins, but also an exclusive new Paper created especially for the book and set into a tray inside its back cover.

Although Mark Staker and Don Enders' book Joseph and Lucy Smith's Tunbridge Farm is a thin volume, it is thick with new information on Mormon founder Joseph Smith's parents' first home in the mountains of Vermont. The home is best known as the birthplace of his older brother Hyrum Smith. The subtitle, An Archaeology and Landscape Study, identifies the source of much of this information. But the book also includes new documentary evidence of the Smith family's time in Tunbridge, Vermont.The authors carried out an archaeological dig at the home that the prophet's father Joseph Smith Sr. and uncle Jesse built for their family in 1791. When Joseph Sr. married Lucy, the newlyweds moved into the house with the rest of the Smith family until Joseph's parents Asael and Mary Smith moved with the rest of their children to a nearby lot.The excavation recovered high-society ceramics but suggested the rural setting in which the Smith family lived. The book details the size and nature of their home. In addition, the landscape study suggests details about how their farm was used, including the type of cows Mary had in her dairy, the layout of the property, the probable location of a buttery on the Smith farm, and possible crops that Joseph and Lucy cultivated.The authors explore the collapse of Smith Settlement as the family experienced financial trouble and sold off their land. Finally, the details of the farm suggest a location for the site where Lucy went to pray shortly before leaving her farm and the setting featured in her first prophetic dream, which concerned her husband and his brother.