Has any religious community been the subject of more curiosity, controversy, or misunderstanding than the Latter-day Saints? From the time pioneers settled the Salt Lake valley, Mormon culture has drawn the public eye and colored the public record — for better or for worse. This landmark volume explores nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Mormon society through the perspectives of journalists, novelists, travel writers, presidents, and other well-known public figures, including such varied people as Susan B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill Cody, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Vincent Price, Will Rogers, Angela Lansbury, Walter Cronkite, Margaret Thatcher, President John F. Kennedy, and dozens more. Some of the accounts are humorous, some flattering, some exaggerated, some insightful. Arranged chronologically, this wide spectrum of viewpoints illustrates a changing public awareness of the Latter-day Saints; taken together, they offer a captivating view of a peculiar people throughout their history.Table of Contents:Charles Francis Adams and John Quincy — 1844John Greenleaf Whittier - 1845President James K. Polk - 1846William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) — 1857Horace Greeley — 1859Sir Richard F. Burton — 1860Mark Twain — 1861President Abraham Lincoln — 1863Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1863Charles Dickens — 1863P.T. Barnum — 1868Susan B. Anthony — 1871Elizabeth Kane - 1872General George A. Custer — 1875Miriam Florence Leslie — 1877John Muir — 1877Lady Mary Duffus Hardy — 1880Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — 1887President Benjamin Harrison — 1891President Theodore Roosevelt — 1911Willa Cather — 1918President Warren G. Harding — 1923Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Second Entry) — 1923President Franklin D. Roosevelt — 1944President Harry S. Truman — 1948Cecil B. DeMille — 1957Harry Golden — 1959Vincent Price — 1959President Herbert Hoover — 1960President John F. Kennedy — 1960-1963Norman Vincent Peale — 1963President Lyndon B. Johnson — 1964Maria von Trapp — 1965Paul Harvey — 1967President Richard M. Nixon — 1970President Gerald R. Ford — 1974-1978Alvin Toffler — 1980Saul Bellow — 1994Margaret Thatcher — 1996President Jimmy Carter — 2004Mike Wallace — 2005Sharon Osbourne — 2005Ma Yin-jeou — 2008Mormon Tabernacle Choir GuestsBrian Stokes Mitchell — 2008Edward Herrmann — 2008Angela Lansbury — 2001Walter Cronkite — 2002Sissel Kyrkjebo — 2006