since its inception, mormonism has confounded the interpretive imagination of American pop culture consumers. In June 1830, less than three months after the publication of the Book of Mormon, the fledgling human-interest press set out on a clumsy mission of discrediting the new religion. Newspapers, whose editors presumably did not bother to read past Joseph Smith's preface, decried the tome as “evidence of fraud, blasphemy and credulity, shocking to the Christian and moralist.”1 The content of the sacred volume was dismissed as fantastical, even as the news of the text's arrival seemed to merit extensive reporting. Four years later, Ohio editor Eber D. Howe reprinted two anti-Mormon woodcuts—a kind of nineteenth-century meme—in one of the first book-length denunciations of the new faith.2 For visual objects designed to dismiss Mormon dogma, the woodcuts were surprisingly detailed, if disparaging, in their retelling of the religion's origin. Protestants were invited to...
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