[The Joseph Smith Papers 01] • The Joseph Smith Papers · Histories, Volume 1 · Joseph Smith Histories, 1832-1844

In November of 1843, when Willard Richards and William W. Phelps were compiling the “History of Joseph Smith,” they reported that noise from a nearby school “disturbed the history “there are but few subjects that I have felt a greater anxiety about than my History.” On another occasion he told Phelps of a message that had come to him in a dream: “the history must go ahead before any thing.” Though lawsuits, financial problems, violent opposition, and other impediments often interfered with Joseph Smith’s attempts to write and oversee the creation of church history, sustained interest and repeated efforts yielded significant results, including several important narrative histories. Presented in this first volume of the Histories series are the six histories that Joseph Smith personally wrote, dictated, or supervised.