British historian Paul Johnson and William Bernstein, American financial theorist, both write of millennia of history without any substantive changes in applied science, the arts and statecraft. Standards of living, modes of travel and communication had hardly changed at all. Then, at a point in the early nineteenth century, all of that began to change radically. Johnson claims that enormous transformation that author William Gibbons calls “The Great Pivot,” emerged in the period 1815-30. Bernstein claims that, after much analysis of the data, if he had to pick a single year for this astonishing development it would be 1820.

Neither author attempts to explain why it happened, but Gibbons claims to know. With the restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ beginning with the appearance of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ to the young Joseph Smith in the year 1820, the light of knowledge began to flood the earth in anticipation of the Gathering of Israel and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Much of the resulting progress seen during Johnson’s period of interest and beyond was offset by the Adversary in his attempt to corrupt and destroy it all.

Gibbons delineates many of the eternal truths and practices restored to the earth by Joseph Smith, and describes why it is that the gospel Restoration could have only happened when it did and where it did - in the United States of America with its founding principles inherited all the way back to Old Testament times and the early Greeks.