From Above and Below: The Mormon Embrace of Revolution, 1840-1940---Winner of the 2014 MHA Best International Book Award! June 06 2014

The Mormon History Association has selected Craig Livingston's From Above and Below: The Mormon Embrace of Revolution, 1840-1940 as its 2014 winner for the Best International Book Award (the same award last year also went to a Kofford Author, Marjorie Newton). 

For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular revolutionary arguments that the old world order needed to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to clear the way for the new. 

In From Above and Below, author Craig Livingston tells the story of Mormon commentary on global revolutions from the European revolutions of 1848 to the collapse of Mormon faith in revolutionary progress in the 1930s, when communist and fascist regimes exposed themselves as violent and repressive. As the Church bureaucratized and assimilated to mainstream American and capitalist values, Mormons became champions of the conservative view of political and social development for which they are known today.

UPDATE (June 10, 2014): An online newspaper in Houston just posted a story on Professor Livingston's award.

Past Kofford Books recipients of MHA awards include:

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Craig Livingston is Professor of History at Lone Star College-Montgomery in The Woodlands, Texas. Prior to his turn to academia, he served as an infantry officer in the US Army.