I am Ryan McKnight. I'm Kara Santa Maria. I am Christopher Smith. Hi, I'm Andrew Torres. This is

Naked Mormonism. The Serial Mormon History podcast. Longtime listeners of this show will know that we've been following John C. Bennett for quite some time, at least for the last few episodes, we've been highlighting his role within Mormonism and the role that his expose played in impacting the church and Navu history.

Throughout all of our examination of John C. Reckett Bennett, we've had this overarching theme that so much of it centered around polygamy,

but we haven't taken so much time to attack the subject of polygamy head on. So in order to

help me do that, I've invited on a very special guest

for today. Johnny Stevenson is an independent researcher of Mormon history, has been studying it

incessantly for five years, just like yours truly, and has a little bit of information to share with

us about the subject of polygamy for today. So, Johnny, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

We have a lot to get through.

I asked if you would come onto the show and really help me out in tackling this subject.

And you sent me over 176 pages worth of notes for us to try and parse through.

So I'm just going to kind of allow you to take this how you want. And the way that we're structuring this, we're breaking this up into two

separate episodes. So how we're going to do this is we're going to study the practices of marriage

and adultery as it was practiced in Ohio and in Missouri and the post-hocer

the post hoc labeling that has been applied to those affairs of polygamy, we're going to

examine that all the way up in two, 1842, when John C. Bennett began publishing his exposés.

Then part two is going to examine the practice of polygamy post-Bennett because there is quite a sharp dividing line here. We're going to

highlight some of the stories of the actual individual women as they were affiliated with polygamy

and their roles in it, who their husbands were.

Primarily were focusing on Joseph Smith, of course.

But let's just get started early on.

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