James Jesse Strang collection

James Jesse Strang was an American religious leader, politician and self-proclaimed monarch. In 1844 he claimed to be the appointed successor of Joseph Smith as leader of the Latter Day Saint movement. Strang founded what became known as the Church of Jesus Christ (Strangites). In addition to his ecclesiastical calling, Strang served one full term and part of a second as a member of the Michigan House of Representatives, 1853-1856, assisting in the organization of Manitou County. He was also at various times an attorney, educator, temperance lecturer, newspaper editor, Baptist minister, correspondent for the New York Tribune, and amateur scientist. He died from bullet wounds he sustained from an assassination in July 1856.

Charles Jesse Strang was the son of James Jesse Strang and Elvira Eliza Field Strang Baker (1830-1910). He was the editor and publisher of the Charlevoix Journal in Charlevoix, Michigan, 1883-1890, as well as postmaster in Charlevoix in 1887. He wrote about his father in "Beaver Island and Its Mormon Kingdom" in J. C. Wright, The Ottawan: A Short History of the Villages and Resorts Surrounding Little Traverse Bay (Lansing, Michigan : R. Smith & Co., 1895), 63-68.

Milo Milton Quaife was a historian, archivist, editor, and author of Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Born in Nashua, Iowa, he received his education at Grinnell College and the University of Missouri and his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1908. He taught at the Lewis Institute in Chicago, Wayne University and the University of Detroit. He served as superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin from 1914 until 1920, as well as Secretary and Editor of the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library from 1924 until he retired in 1947.

Quaife was an editor of the Wisconsin Magazine of History from its founding in 1917 to 1922, as well as managing editor of Mississippi Valley Historical Review from 1924 to 1930, and editor the Lakeside Classics Series, an imprint of The Lakeside Press, from 1916 to 1959. Quaife also authored more than 100 works including his work about James Jesse Strang, Kingdom of St. James (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1930)

Quaife died in an automobile accident on September 1, 1959.