In a recent post, the question was asked, ”how significant is Mormon history to the larger narrative of American history?”

I think there are several ways it is significant, and I will just touch on one of them here. In Sarah Gordon’s book, The Mormon Question, she states that the Mormon situati (more…)

Rumors have floated around since earlier this year that Warren Jeffs had renounced his role as Prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and that he had not held the FLDS priesthood since he was twenty years old. Court documents containing these allegations had been sealed so as not to influence jurors in his recent trial, but the judge recently reversed this decision and released the documents. Jeffs recanted these confessions in Febru (more…)

(more…)

David’s recent post, coupled with a review of a new book by John Turner over at Religion in American History, has caused me to reflect on the place of Mormonism in larger narratives of American history.  Recent historians of the Jacksonian Era have taken different approaches to the subject of Mormonism.  Charles Sellers, in his 1991 The Market Revolution, spent nearly nine pages of his chapter on “God and Mammon” explaining and interpreting early Mormonism.  (more…)

As sociologist Barry Schwartz has shown with Abraham Lincoln, great men and women become great not because of what they do in life, but by how they survive in memories and narratives of those that follow. Most Americans (outside of the South) remember Lincoln as a national hero that held steady during crisis, unified the country, and brought an end to slavery. But during his (more…)

University of Illinois Press has been one of the major reasons for the flowering of Mormon scholarship in recent decades. Many groundbreaking pieces have been published through this venue, and many of their books can be found on all of our book shelves. This made it all the more difficult when rumors started trickling out that they were not going to be doing Mormon history anymore. The rumor was that since Elizabeth Dulany retired, the press did not want to accept (more…)

Over at the Mormon Wasp, Justin has presented compelling evidence that the oft-cited story about Leo Tolstoy describing Mormonism as the American religion is probably an exaggeration. It is true that Mormons have preferred to imagine a much more grandious version of Tolstoy’s opinions of Mormonism, but an equally fascinating question is why have academics in recent (more…)