Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Fall 2013

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 33:4 (Fall 2013).

Comments

Copyright © 2013 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University, and the Western Americana Archives at the University of Utah-Villages on Wheels is organized topically, with a slight nod to chronology across the span of the book. It offers a unique glimpse into the ways the lives of Mormon travelers were shaped by the overland trail, a transitory period in which traditional conventions and daily routines were suspended in deference to the realities of constant mobility.

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