Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Joseph Smith podcast. I'm your host for today, John DeLinn. It is July 24th, 2025. This is a Mormon Stories podcast production. And today we are covering part nine of our series that's beginning with John Turner's new book published by Yale University Press called Joseph

Smith, The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.

John Turner is a professor of history at George Mason University, and we are covering today

chapter nine in his book called Flying High, and it covers the 1831 period that includes Joseph Smith showing up in Kirtland.

So that's what we're covering.

For those who have not already been joining us in this series,

there are eight other episodes.

We're going chronologically.

There are already eight other episodes that we've recorded.

This series is best consumed chronologically.

So consider Googling Joseph Smith Podcast

or finding the Joseph Smith Podcast playlist on YouTube. We're going to be

releasing all these episodes in a series on Spotify and Apple Podcast as well. There are visuals

sometimes, but we welcome you all. The purpose of this series, as we've said before, is to get

history-based, factual-based, evidence-based perspective

on the life of the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Dy Saints, which is Joseph Smith.

And we picked John Turner to kick off this series, not only because this book is new, but also because he's one of the first historians to write a super credible

biography of Joseph Smith that wasn't either a faithful semi-apologetic believing Mormon historian

a la Richard Bushman or an ex- Mormon historian likeom Brody or Dan Vogel.

So we're having him call balls and strikes as a disinter, I'll say not disinterested,

as a purely objective, 100% neutral.

I'm smiling tongue and cheek, third party.

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