"The Kansas City suburb of Independence, Missouri, is associated primarily with its most famous son, President Harry Truman. Yet Independence is also home to a unique and complex religious landscape regarded as sacred space by hundreds of thousands of people associated with the Latter Day Saint family of churches. In 1831 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint (LDS) movement, declared Independence the site of the New Jerusalem, where followers would build a sacred city, the center of Zion." "Smith's plan would have mixed the best qualities of the nineteenth-century American pastoral and urban psyche. However, the great splintering among returning Latter Day Saint groups has led to divergent beliefs and multiple interpretations of millennial place. Images of the New Jerusalem culls viewpoints from publications and interviews and contrasts them with official church doctrines and mapped land holdings."--BOOK JACKET.