| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sports in Zion: Mormon Recreation, 1890–1940. By Richard Ian Kimball. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xii, 217 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02857-0.)

Richard Ian Kimball has made a significant contribution both to the history of Mormonism in American society and to the sociology of religious accommodation. His thesis is that the development and institutionalization of Mormon sports, physical fitness, and recreation programs during the Progressive Era of American history played an important role in maintaining a distinctive Mormon identity while simultaneously helping to facilitate the accommodation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to the cultural values and political economy of American society. By the 1890s, the Mormons' protracted struggle with the federal government was finally coming to an end. The principal problem for the church at that critical juncture in its history was how to preserve the faith and commitment of future generations of Mormons to their religious heritage. This is a subject that has received considerable scholarly attention, most of which has focused on LDS doctrinal modifications and corresponding political and economic adaptations. Kimball, however, is the first to focus systematic attention on the role played by an emerging ideology of recreation and church-sponsored youth programs in the process of Mormon accommodation and expansion in the twentieth century.

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