The Book of Mormon is a volume of sacred scripture containing the history of a branch of the house of Israel which inhabited the ancient Americas. It is held to be canonical by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and related denominations. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Deseret). It is not a reproduction of the 1869 Deseret Alphabet edition of the Book of Mormon but a completely new transliteration based on the modern text and modern chapter-verse divisions.