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Jan Shipps, Richard Lyman Bushman, the Story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, and the New Mormon History, Journal of American History, Volume 94, Issue 2, September 2007, Pages 498–516, https://doi.org/10.2307/25094962
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Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. By Richard Lyman Bushman. (New York: Knopf, 2005. xxiv, 740 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-1-4000-4270-8.)
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman's biography of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, is the crowning achievement of the new Mormon history, an intellectual and historiographical movement that carried the story of the Latter-day Saints into the cultural mainstream just as Mormonism itself was moving in from the margins to find a place on the American religious landscape as a respectable belief system and an upstanding faith community.1 Still embryonic in the 1950s, this intellectual wave did not fully take shape as a movement until a substantial cohort of young members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah (the lds Church), and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints headquartered in Independence, Missouri (the rlds Church), earned their doctorates in history from reputable graduate schools outside the Mormon culture region.2 Bushman, a lifelong member of the lds Church who earned his degree at Harvard University, was one of this band of well-schooled scholars.