The “Heartland Model”: The Rest of the Story

To most readers who believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon, the book is a real account about real people who lived somewhere in the New World. This article was written primarily about those readers who believe that all New World events recorded in the Book of Mormon took place in the continental United States, mostly in the territory from the Great Lakes on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. By their own preference, these readers tend to refer to themselves as “Heartlanders” because to them, their proposed geography of the Book of Mormon took place in the “heartland” of the United States.

In this article, Heartlander thinking is compared frequently with the proposals of another group, some of whom call themselves “Mesoamericanists” because they believe, in general, that all New World events of the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica.

This article is not truly a book review. However, the analyses in the article are mostly comments about the content of two books: (1) the nineteenth-century Book of Mormon and (2) a twenty-first-century book whose authors are devoted believers of the Heartland Model for Book of Mormon geography.