Joseph Smith's Polygamy
Few areas of Mormon history are as contested, scandalized, and misunderstood than Joseph Smith's marriages to multiple women. In Brian Hales's exhaustive 3-volume series, he closely examines every known document and account of this practice to not only offer a more accurate account of this aspect of Mormonism, but to also place the practice within the broader theological world that Joseph Smith was revealing. In the fourth volume of this series, Toward a Better Understanding, Brian and Laura Hales present the findings of their research in a more accessible manner, providing both a easy to read chronology of how the practice developed and a collection of brief biographies of each of the known wives of the Prophet.