Joseph Smith is a well-documented historical person, and modern scholarship has produced a large critical literature about him, anchored by Richard Bushman's biography Rough Stone Rolling and by the ongoing Joseph Smith Papers project. Historians situate his early life in the folk culture of treasure-seeking and seer stones common in his time and place, a background the church's own Gospel Topics essays now discuss openly, including his use of a seer stone in producing the Book of Mormon. His career was marked by controversy that continues to be studied: the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society bank in 1837, the bitter conflicts in Missouri, the secretive introduction of plural marriage at Nauvoo, and disputes over the Book of Abraham, which he presented as a translation of Egyptian papyri that Egyptologists read differently.
Assessments of him diverge sharply, from prophet to gifted religious innovator to fraud, and the sources, many of them partisan, for or against, rarely settle the question of his sincerity. What is not in dispute is his historical importance: from his work issued a scripture, a church, and a religious tradition that now counts millions of adherents worldwide. The atlas records the documented life and the range of interpretation without adjudicating his prophetic claims.