Over the holiday, I came across this bit of family history. It is a brief essay written by my paternal grandfather detailing the characteristics of his “dream girl.” (more…)

I begin in the time-honored, much-ridiculed Mormon fashion of offering a disclaimer about my qualifications and a story about what happened when I was asked to give this talk.

The disclaimer: one of the great things about being an editor is that I never have to have any original thoughts. There may not be any good new ideas in this talk, in which case, all you have to do is submit some new papers to Dialogue so I can get my plagiarisms up-to-date. I’m also not trained as an historian, and the applicability of what training I have is highly questionable. I will therefore talk very fast so that we can get to the interesting part of the evening where you tell me about why I am wrong and what you are going to do about it. (more…)

Over the past year, I have published several posts on JI about my research on how the civil rights movement was discussed in BYU’s student newspaper, the Daily Universe, during the 1950s and 1960s. I have recently begun studying a new aspect of this research that has proved particularly interesting and enlightening – how civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was talked about in the pages of the Daily Universe in the latter part of the 1960s and then again in the 1980s as the national discussion on establishing a federal holiday in honor of King came to Utah. In the next few posts on JI, I will analyze how students discussed King’s role as a civil rights leader in 1968, 1969, and the 1980s. (more…)

[Continued from Part I]

I sincerely appreciate the three respondents participating in this forum. I’m sure all the readers will agree that all three portions are well-written and enlightening.

Although these  three are well-known around the bloggernacle, here are brief introductions: Robin Jensen is an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, recently received his second master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his name can be found on the cover of the recent Revelations and Translations vol. 1. Samuel Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Division Associate, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of Utah. Jordan Watkins, theoretically a contributor here at JI, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. (more…)

While JI has not done one recently, we have from time to time written a “From the Archives” post where we pluck from the historical archives an interesting document as a way to highlight an important theme, offer a new interpretation, or merely start an enlightening discussion. This post is aimed to do all of the above, only perhaps even more so because of the interesting nature of this particular document. It offers so many possibilities for interpretation, in fact, that I have asked three knowledgeable historians to give their take on it from their individual backgrounds and expertise. (more…)

Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.

On Zion’s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer’s Ph.D. dissertation (more…)

If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)

And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?

For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?

The Mexican Mission was officially established in 1879 and lasted until 1889 before it was reestablished in 1901. During that first ten years, less than 300 people had been baptized, many of which had become indifferent, lukewarm, or had renounced their membership entirely. Little wonder, that as the American missionaries labored to keep branches alive and holding regular Sunday services, they seem to have placed auxiliary organizations, like the Relief Society, on hold. (more…)

Building off of Christopher’s recent review of Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, I though I would post a recent review I’ve written on an important historical text that, while not directly addressing Mormonism, offers intriguing questions and approaches that we can apply to Mormon history. The first section is my review of Howe’s fascinating volume, while the second section provides a few paragraphs on how we can relate it to Mormon studies. (more…)

I’ve frequently seen complaints that Joseph Smith’s practice of marrying already-married women is “particularly troubling.” That is, that marrying married women is somehow worse than marrying single women. Why is that? Why is men sharing a wife somehow worse than women sharing a husband? (more…)

My daughter was diagnosed with Perthes yesterday. It’s a condition where blood doesn’t get to the hip bone and so it doesn’t grow, which causes all kinds of problems. She’s been having a lot of difficulty walking recently but the doctor says its very treatable and for this we are grateful.

Her condition reminded me of a few stories from the past that I’ve read recently. (more…)

I’ve written previously on ways Mormon historians can transcend the 1890 rupture and begin to conceptualize and integrate the twentieth century into narratives of Mormon history. I suggested that one way to do this is to historicize contemporary issues, such as those surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and show how the past can illuminate the present. Some may protest that this approach is overly-presentist, but I would argue that all history is presentist to one degree or another, and as historians we should be writing histories that are useful and useable. (more…)

I

One of Max Weber’s more evocative phrases is the “disenchantment of the world.” I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.
(more…)

I ran into Reid Neilson earlier this week and he mentioned that a job would be opening up at the JSPP. He recently emailed me the job description to post here for all interested.  Good luck to all applicants!

Historian/Documentary Editor, Joseph Smith Papers Project-0900581 (more…)

[See the Spanish translation of this post here.]

I watched with interest discussions such as this one that involved teaching about the Priesthood Ban in Sunday School as part of Lesson 42 on Continuing Revelation. I was at a party a few weeks ago and talked with the Sunday School president about what I’d been reading and hearing from others about how these lessons were going. I’d had him watch the Nobody Knows documentary a few months ago, and he had liked it, and he thought that a lesson on the topic might be beneficial. I told him that if that’s the direction he felt to go that he should run it by the bishop to make sure he was on board and that if so, I’d be willing to teach it. That Sunday he came back and said that it was a go for December 6, 2009. (more…)

E. Dale Lebaron, former BYU Professor and president of the South African Mission when the Priesthood ban was rescinded died on Thursday, Dec. 3 from injuries sustained in an auto-pedestrian accident near his home. See this story in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Lebaron was known as an avid student of the history of the Church in Africa and devoted much time collecting oral histories and other documentation. He gave multiple presentations and authored a book on African conversions, All Are Alike Unto God.

I must admit that I’m not very familiar with his work, but feel it appropriate to make mention of this tragic circumstance that befell a collector and documenter of African Mormon history. His decades long involvment with the Church in Africa both before and after the 1978 revelation makes me hope that he was himself interviewed about his activites and/or that he kept a journal of his doings. LeBaron was 75.

Tomorrow at 7 pm Kristine Haglund will be delivering the first Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association lecture. See the organizer’s site for details.  I hope to see you there!

Plus, at 5 pm at Hector’s Miramar [Mexican food] Kristine herself will be having dinner, and we’d love for those who can to come on down and join her for an informal dinner and conversation. The address is 342 West 1300 South in Salt Lake City. Going west on 1300 S. toward I-15, it’s on the north side of the street just before you hit the freeway. Here is a google map just in case. Come on down, after all, it’s not every day that we get these sophisticated Easterners out here in the boondocks! Hope to see you.

With the Advent season upon us, I feel constrained to praise God for the gift of the Son. I glory in Jesus Christ and hope you do as well. I do not offer this as a definitive piece of theology; (more…)

Along with Jared T’s list of recently published and forthcoming book in Mormon history, I thought I would put up my own perspective on the past scholarly year. Not only does this allow me to mention some of the articles that caught my eye in the last twelve months, but it also provides a way to discuss major themes of recent scholarship. (more…)