Reid Neilson's well-timed study is an earnest look at a critical period in the history of Mormon self-presentation. On the heels of the forced public renunciation of plural marriage in 1890 by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, its leaders sent a delegation to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago to advertise the ‘cultural contributions of [the Utah] Territory’ (p. 49) and, inevitably, to present their widely-suspect religion to the American public. Such dramatic and considered efforts of self-presentation make for useful objects of study: like all forms of advertising, they make explicit impulses and preoccupations that are normally only implied. Neilson's overarching argument – that the Columbian Exposition marks the beginning of ‘a larger story of accommodation and assimilation on the part of the Mormons into the American religious mainstream’ (p. 8) – is sometimes lost amid the bureaucratic details of the organisation of the World's Fair, but he has carefully uncovered an important historical moment. Neilson's attention to the participation of Mormon women in the Exposition's events – they found a greater degree of acceptance than did Mormon men, for reasons that he elaborates – is particularly appreciated, as is his dramatic evocation of the personalities behind the exclusion of Mormon speakers from the World's Parliament of Religions (held along with the Exposition in the autumn of 1893). A final chapter tracing the participation of the Church in World's Fairs through 1934 would have driven home the larger argument about Mormon assimilation more forcefully if it had extended further into the twentieth century, but Neilson has provided a useful study for those interested in religious pluralism and American culture.