The Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century belonged to an apocalyptic tradition, argues historian and folklorist Christopher Blythe in his highly informative book Terrible Revolution....Blythe charts the rise and fall of Mormon apocalyptic discourse over the two-hundred- year history of the Restoration. He defines "apocalyptic" as "the belief that society was headed toward cataclysmic events that would uproot the current social order in favor of a divine order that would be established in its place".
Christopher James Blythe is an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on folklore and Latter-day Saint literature. He has previously held positions at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship and the Joseph Smith Papers. From 2016-2022, Blythe was an editor for the Journal of Mormon History. He has published extensively in academic journals including Nova Religio, Journal of Religion, and Material Religion; co-edited three volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers series and an edited collection, Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition (University of Utah, 2022).