BYU Studies
Since 1959

The Archive of Restoration Culture is a vast database of over 3,000 pages that helps to reconstruct the cultural environment of the Prophet Joseph Smith. It was created under the supervision of Richard Lyman Bushman in tandem with his research for Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). The entries in the archive are provided by fellows in the Joseph Smith Summer Seminar, a yearly research seminar during which scholars spent a month or longer at BYU researching the context of the restoration. The database includes excerpts from sermons, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, artworks, and private diaries from the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Each entry contains a short explanation of the text being included, an explanation of how the text relates to Mormon concepts, and the contextualizing text itself.