Americans held to a literal view with a New World perspective, believing that Christ’s appearance would be to Native Americans, "the lost tribes of Israel," at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which Puritans considered to be the "New Jerusalem." However, within two centuries Boston Congregationalists saw more romantic imagery than literal truth in such teachings, and the millennialist torch passed to the frontier, to Christian primitivists and others—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Millerites, Shakers, and Latter-day Saints—who looked either to 1843 or to the turn of the new century for the Second Coming.

For Mormons everything hinged on 1890-91. The closer the hour drew, the greater the anticipation until it was obvious that the world was not going to immediately change, resulting in widespread cognitive dissonance, followed by sweeping theological adjustments. What had been a radical, militant, separatist sect was transformed within a few years into a moderate, more mainstream denomination. As Dan Erickson so convincingly demonstrates, by confronting a failed millennial expectation, Mormons shared an important rite of passage with much of Christendom. Given the lesson of history, it should be another century or two before the same pattern is repeated, most likely by a dissenting splinter group.

Dan Erickson, author of "As a Thief in the Night": The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliverance, is an adjunct professor of history at Chaffey College and vice president of Union Bank in Rancho Cucamonga, California. He holds B.A. and B.S. degrees from Brigham Young University; an M.A. from California State University, Fullerton; and an M.B.A. from California State University, San Bernardino. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at Claremont Graduate University. He has published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Journal of Mormon History, and the Welebaethan, and has received Best Article awards from two of these publications. He lives in Riverside, California, with his wife, Jennifer, and four children.