The Real Book of Mormon

Our pageants and our films too often in the past have been cardboard cutout kinds of things–almost scriptural Barbies and Kens. I want them to be flesh and blood human beings, the real Nephi, the real Alma, the real Mormon and Moroni, as far as we can construct the real–discover the real. This reality, to counter the fantasy–the sense of fantasy that so many of us have about the Book of Mormon as a mere story–requires that we know where events took place and, of course, when they took place. That means geography and history with a capital “H.”

John Sorenson, “The Book of Mormon in Ancient America,” (1994), 5.