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The quest for effective community leadership, a persistent theme in world history, is the central theme of this path-breaking analysis of the confluence of community building and an underappreciated group of community leaders: the Latter-day Saint bishops. This study focuses on ecclesiastical leadership in the settlements of the nineteenth-century American West that were founded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Bishops were at the heart of an expansive, inspiring, and unprecedented experience in community building. They exerted a greater direct influence on community-building than any comparable American leadership group since the Puritan fathers in colonial New England. The bishops were the town fathers, the pillars of their communities. Their value-based leadership, their other-worldly approach to worldly affairs, their quest for community, and their zeal for the collective good conjures up images of seventeenth- century Puritans, and yet these western Saints were no mere imitation. Their unique faith, characterized by both preaching and practice, left what eventually became an American and global legacy.

Community Leadership on the Mormon Frontier: Latter-day Saint Bishops and the Political, Economic, Religious, and Social Development of Utah before Statehood