A few years ago, as I prepared for my comprehensive exams, I read several excellent studies on Mormonism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Books by scholars like Sarah Gordon, J. Spencer Fluhman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Kathleen Flake helped me to consider how the history of Mormonism helps us to understand how religion functioned during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. With that said, I do not study Mormons. Nevertheless, last summer as I was conducting research in a small ethnic enclave in West Michigan, all of that comp reading came in particularly handy when discovered an extensive Read more