My first visit to Nauvoo, Illinois was as a teenager in 1974. My family lived in Jackson County, Missouri, where my father’s work for the Air Force had taken us, and we spent many a weekend visiting Mormon history sites. Nauvoo was, hands down, our favorite, and we all, even us kids, pooled our pocket money so we could stay a day longer than anticipated. We traced the outlines of foundation stones uncovered on the temple site, then marked only with a model of the temple and a few signboards; we walked along unpaved roads leading to the swollen river; we listened respectfully to the LDS and RLDS guides at their respective properties, and as a family discussed what we had seen and heard and felt and done, after we returned to our motel room each night.

I went back again in the summer of 1978, still a teenager. A few things had changed in that short interval: the sculpture garden monument to women was newly opened; there were horse-drawn wagon and buggy rides that hadn’t been there before; and there seemed to be more paved parking lots encroaching on the quiet streets. Still, you could be alone with your thoughts and imaginings, and see where the stories learned from seminary and personal reading had played out in what felt like an authentic stepping back into history.

Later visits have not felt so serene. Hucksterism had arrived, with Ye Olde Nauvoo This-and-That Shoppes everywhere. No longer could you imagine how it might have felt to leave Nauvoo; instead, you were told what to feel by the little quotation-bearing signs cluttering the road down to the river. (They were trying to dub it the “Trail of Hope,” but everybody called it the “Trail of Tears,” which I recognized even then as an usurpation of the sufferings of the Native Americans.) There was ubiquitous cosplay, with a jumble of styles from many eras, with most costumed players wearing far grander clothing than most of our ancestors would have worn during those years in Nauvoo – everybody was a king; nobody was a pauper.

In short, the last time I visited Nauvoo, it became fixed in my mind as Disney-on-the-Mississippi. I haven’t cared to go back in recent years. The city that had let me sense the physicality of my Mormon heritage was gone – or maybe the fabric of the city was still there, but it was buried under layers of other people’s sentimentalized and grandiose pretensions.

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Everything has a context. Nothing – not even our universe – springs fully formed out of nothing. Nauvoo was and is no different. The Mormons who settled there in 1839 came with their own history of hope and persecution and American ideals and personal fears. The Mormons who fled there in 1846 left with a new history: a glorious history of revelation and temple building; a heartbreaking history of martyrdom and disillusionment with Americanism. The Mormons of later generations saw it through the glow of nostalgia as “the City of Joseph,” choosing to remember those bits of its story that turned grief into glory, conveniently forgetting the context of internal dissensions and the growing pains of new religious practice.

For much of the late 20th century and into the 21st, the context for Nauvoo in our collective memory has been held captive by the superannuated dons and the faded grandes dames of our history telling, the “historians” who had a store of random anecdotes at their command, but little real grasp of Nauvoo’s context. They painted, and continue to insist that everyone still paint, Nauvoo as a sort of Brigadoon, a city out of time, one whose true beauty and meaning can be understood only by those who retell, in hushed and reverential tones, the incomplete, distorted, over-sweetened tales spun by those grandes dames.

Fortunately for all of us, more skillful, more knowledgeable historians who aren’t content with a one-sided perspective of the perfections of Nauvoo and the Latter-day Saints who once lived there have arisen in recent years. Glen Leonard’s A Place of Peace, a People of Promise bridged the historical divide between the old bedtime stories of the perfection that was Nauvoo and the new world of historical breadth and depth of research. Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling did not hesitate to tackle the history of Nauvoo polygamy and Joseph Smith’s role in and practice of that marital form.

Latest in this new generation of historians who are unafraid of looking at the past as the documentation shows it to have been is Benjamin E. Park, in his recent Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. Ben makes a very specific contribution to our understanding of the reality and meaning of Nauvoo: He yanks Nauvoo out of its Brigadoonish fantasy world and places it on the firm ground of American political and social history of the 1830s and ’40s. No longer is Nauvoo a purely religious creation without beginning nor end; it now grows from the roots of its time and place in both a political world and the realm of Mormon response to that world. And Ben does it beautifully, making the fullest use yet of newly available documents like the Council of Fifty minutes (which, again, he does not pretend exist solely within the Mormon religious sphere, but which he uses to tie the city of Nauvoo and its court and executive systems to the American world from which they sprang).

Frankly, coming from an upbringing largely formed by those outdated religious historians who painted everything as either the pure goodness of a saintly people or as the unreasoning hatred of evil oppressors motivated solely by opposition to The Truth, history such as Ben writes is refreshing, stabilizing, and helps a believer like me have confidence in the knowability of our history. That is, for the first time I have an understanding of the legal difficulties of Joseph Smith and other leading Latter-day Saints – not just the whens and whats, but more importantly, the whys. The “mobs” (I’ll adopt the grandes dames’ shorthand here) didn’t hate Joseph Smith because he wouldn’t hand them our votes; they didn’t fear the Nauvoo Legion as a military force; they didn’t hate us because we had The Truth and they were demons who fought against God. Rather, they were Americans who had their own ideas of how America should function, free from the control of religious dictation common before the Republic. If Mormons could justly be disillusioned by the failure, as they saw it, of government to protect them in their religious rights, their non-Mormon neighbors could justly be disillusioned by the failure, as they saw it, of government to protect them from the priestly machinations of Mormons who used a version of the law to wiggle out of every legitimate attempt to bring malefactors before the law. When both sides gave up on Americanism, both sides took direct action outside that Americanism: the Mormons began drafting an alternative to the American Constitution, and non-Mormons (and, frankly, Mormons in some cases) took extra-legal, violent measures to address wrongs that the legal system seemed powerless to handle.

These are not matters that fit conveniently into the traditional tales of Mormonism. For one thing, they have no obvious role in strengthening faith and promoting religious conversion, and may be more suited to other venues than Sunday worship. We need more such venues to supplement our Sunday Schools.

But – and there can be no real contradiction to this – neither are these matters anti-Mormon, or destructive to faith, or harmful to the mission of the Church … except, I suppose, to those few who cannot look at truth unless it is shaded by the protective lenses of traditional, tired, one-sided, protect-the-Church-at-all-costs stories of the ragged, dusty, unconvincing, obsolete teachers of the past. The documents that Ben uses to tell the story of Kingdom of Nauvoo are authentic and available for study by all. It will not do to wave them away, saying that Ben is too young, too inexperienced to know what he is talking about, too much in need of mentoring by those obsolete voices.

Ben can do – has done – something that would be impossible for those older, crotchety historians to tackle. He is exceptionally knowledgeable about the early Republic, about early American history, about political philosophy – topics that are far beyond the ken of Mormon historians whose entire careers have been built on telling embellished and soothing tales to promote sighs of delight and tears of devotion from young and inexperienced students.

I’ve sat through such tearful lectures by such sob-sister historians. I have also heard several presentations by Ben Park concerning Kingdom of Nauvoo. The one makes me grieve for my fellow Latter-day Saints as I watch their surrender to emotional manipulation. The other makes me proud of being a Mormon, of associating with real teachers, of providing, when I can, documents for their continued work. I trust Ben and others like him. They are the mentors for a new generation of students and historians and writers and teachers.

This has not been a review of Kingdom of Nauvoo, obviously. I am delighted by the real reviews I have been reading. Rather, this is a vote of confidence in Ben Park and his work, and a call for more from him, and more like him. Such multi-faceted perspectives on the Mormon past enrich my life, my faith, my kinship with my fellows.