Troublesome Children

Debates over Mormons in the nineteenth century United States were rarely solely about Mormonism. This dissertation examines the ways in which Utah-oriented discourses of outsider groups influenced political debates at the local, regional, and national levels between 1848 and 1893. As recent studies by Sarah Barringer Gordon and Terryl Givens have shown, the conflicts around which these discourses developed pertained to Mormons and polygamy specifically, but also to broader questions of religious freedom, racial diversity, and the extent to which a community might operate autonomously within the United States.