The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began formally commissioning women to preach the restored gospel and bring souls to Jesus Christ around the turn of the twentieth century. The journals featured in this digital publication document the day-to-day experiences of some of the church’s earliest full-time women missionaries, whose pioneering work left an enduring legacy of service that remains vital to the church’s missionary efforts into the twenty-first century.

Isabelle Maria Harris spent the summer of 1883 in the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, imprisoned for contempt of court after refusing to answer a grand jury’s questions concerning her former husband’s practice of plural marriage. The journal she kept there offers an intimate look at nineteenth-century women’s prison life and the struggle of an ordinary Latter-day Saint who found herself at the center of a political controversy.

Eliza R. Snow, second general president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a prolific speaker and the most influential Latter-day Saint woman of her time. She taught religious doctrine, emphasized practical principles, shared her political opinions, and conveyed love and encouragement for church members in nearly twelve hundred discourses given from 1840 to 1887 in western Illinois and throughout Utah and Idaho territories. Her discourses, captured by scores of secretaries, clerks, and editors in hundreds of record books and newspaper articles, are gathered and published together here for the first time.

The forty-seven diaries of Emmeline B. Wells provide a window into the life of one of the most influential Latter-day Saint women in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the diaries she is both historymaker, as she meets with presidents and works with national suffrage leaders, and historian, as she documents noteworthy events, daily interactions with her family and members of her community, and her adversities and faith.

The life of George F. Richards, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for forty-four years, bridged the pioneer era and modern era of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For seventy years of his life—from 1880 to 1950—Richards kept an almost-daily journal of his activities. The journals are a remarkable resource for those interested in the history of the church, the history of Utah, and the man himself.

This significant collection, published in 2017, features fifty-four talks given by Latter-day Saint women from 1831 to 2016, with selections from every decade since the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the talks, women draw on inspiration and experience to explain and bear witness of their beliefs. Introductions and notes provide insight into the historical and theological context of each talk. In addition to being a scholarly history, this book provides a resource for today’s Latter-day Saints as they study, speak, teach, and lead.

At the Pulpit is available at Deseret Book, Amazon, Store.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, and many other retail outlets.

This volume, published in 2016, reveals the largely unknown early history of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through seventy-eight key documents. Beginning with the society’s founding in 1842 and extending through its fiftieth anniversary, the volume features transcripts of meeting minutes, sermons, annual reports, articles, petitions, speeches, poetry, letters, journal entries, and reminiscences.

The First Fifty Years of Relief Society is available at Deseret Book, Amazon, Store.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, and many other retail outlets.

George Q. Cannon was a significant leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as in government, business, education, and publishing, in the last half of the nineteenth century. His activities, personality, and insights on the world around him are revealed in his voluminous journal.

For one who had little schooling, Joseph Smith left an unusually extensive documentary record. From 1828, when he began work on the Book of Mormon at age twenty-two, to 1844, when he was killed at age thirty-eight, Smith produced thousands of pages of revelations, translations, letters, declarations, discourses, journals, histories, and other documents. Images and transcripts of these documents, along with historical annotation, are found in The Joseph Smith Papers.

Volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers are available at Deseret Book, Amazon, Store.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, and many other retail outlets.