[This is a continuation of sorts of an earlier post on Native Americans and early Mormonism.--David G.]

Joseph Smith and the Code of Handsome Lake

Lori Taylor, Ph.D.

Lori Taylor has three degrees in American Studies: Ph.D. from the SUNY at Buffalo, M.A. from The George Washington University, and B.A. from Brigham Young University. Through all of those degrees, she chased down the ways people frame and reframe the cultural and historical tidbits from which they make deep meaning. The joy in historiography for Lori is the story that makes THEN interesting NOW.

In 1994, sitting in a Western-themed lodge in Billings, Montana, a friend and colleague told me a story that I spent the next several years hunting down. (more…)

My parents elected to have me baptized December 23, and I also chose the date of my marriage to be December 23. I like those little numeric connections to Joseph Smith. But the one I like most is the one that was not chosen by my family or me. On June 27 I entered the MTC. It gives me pause every time.

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HBO’s popular Big Love series and David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel The 19th Wife stand as evidence that polygamy remains a perennial topic of interest for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that scholarly presses with heavily-Mormon themed catalogues continue to publish serious work on the subject. Utah State University Press’s excellent Life Writings of Frontier Women series has once again offered a sterling piece of documentary history with the publication of Post Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff, edited by Lu Ann Taylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder. (more…)

While doing some research in the John Mills Whitaker Collection at the University of Utah the other day, I discovered the following two letters, both of which seem to indicate some interesting things about Progressive Era Mormonism and its efforts to redefine itself as a profoundly American Religion.  Whitaker was the third seminary teacher in the Church and commanded a great deal of influence within the seminary system during its first two decades.  At the time that he received these letters, he was the principal of the Granite Seminary.

Adam S. Bennion to John M. Whitaker, 6 September 1921, John Mills Whitaker, Papers 1849-1963, MS 2, box 18, folder 4: (more…)

Kevin L. Mortensen, ed. Witnessing The Hand of the Lord in the Dominican Republic. Centerville, UT: DR History Project, Inc., 2008. 309 pp. Illustrations, maps, footnotes, appendices, bibliography. Hardback: $69.00 (Spanish edition: $24.00); ISBN (English) 978-0-9821491-5-7.  http://drldshistory.info.

I guess this will double as a book review/notice. Back during Spring Break I took some time to read a history of the Church in the Dominican Republic. It’s an interesting book that deals with the first five years of the Church in the Dominican Republic (1978-1983) and was chiefly compiled by one of the first missionaries to serve there with contributions from many of those early missionaries, Mission Presidents, and some early members. (more…)

To get a better understanding of the cultural milieu of early Mormonism, one might need to make an extra trip to Yale’s Beinecke Library. And read French.

Damrosch, Leo. Tocqueville’s Discovery of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. xxi + 227 pp. Illustrations, maps, endnotes, index. Hardback: $27.00; ISBN 978-0-374-27817-5. (more…)

I just saw in the BYU Bookstore a brand new publication from the Religious Studies Center. From their website:

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The Church History Library will be holding a Women’s History Lecture Series for the second half of 2010. It begins 8 July with a lecture by Chad Orton, CHL archivist, titled “Those They Left Behind: Experiences of Missionary Wives and Children, Unsung Heroes of the Restoration”. Knowing the caliber of these lecturers and their work, the lectures will in no doubt (more…)

Much to our collective dismay, Elizabeth has decided to step down as a contributor here at Juvenile Instructor. Liz came aboard almost two years ago and for a long time was the lone female blogger here. She’s contributed a number of insightful and provocative posts during her tenure, and more recently launched two of JI’s more successful series—Secularism and Religious Education, exploring the ways different Mormon students at Divinity Schools have grappled with secularism and their individual educational pursuits in Religious Studies and Women in the Academy, profiling several up-and-coming female Latter-day Saint scholars. Perhaps more than all of that, though, Liz is known for incorporating the personal into her academic and historical reflections. (more…)

Jon Butler argued in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People that colonial Americans were not really “Christianized” until late in the eighteenth century. In making his argument, Butler was essentially applying the “dechristianization” thesis to colonial America (he mentions Mormons in a later chapter). To shed light on these arguments, I wanted to summarize the debates over the dechristianization thesis. (more…)

The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the “official” end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South. (more…)

Esteemed Friends of the JI,

I have an exciting announcement for all of you interested in Mormon women’s studies and who have the desire to be published! Deseret Book is creating a new series called Women of Faith in the Latter Days and is calling to YOU for submissions. The volumes will be primarily story-and-faith-based and will provide an important opportunity to generate interest in Mormon women in popular LDS culture, with an aim to inspire deeper research at present and in the future.  We need thorough, historically-based research (which you are all so good at!) in conjunction with narratives of faith and testimony. Below you will find the prospectus for the volumes. Share the story of an LDS woman you admire and submit an article for any volume listed. Feel free to send an email to the address below for additional details. Thanks all!  Brittany (more…)

A week or two ago when my wife was out of town, my daughter (yes, that one) said something at dinner that caught me off guard. “I don’t believe our church is true.” She’s eight. That in and of itself didn’t catch me totally off guard because a month or so before she asked while we were doing scripture reading, “what if our church isn’t true and God is mad at us for going to the wrong church.” At that time I told her that I knew that if she prayed God would lead her in the way He saw fit. (more…)

[The following is the introduction to my recently published article in Dialogue. I post it here with three goals in mind: 1) To get any feedback/corrections/accusations on the article, as well as to provide discussion for anyone else who finds the topic as fascinating as I do. 2) To fulfill my guilt and anxiety to post something of substance here, but doing so without much work on my part. 3) To remind everyone what a great resource Dialogue is, and how awesome they are for strengthening their online presence. For those who haven't done so yet, go to their website right now and subscribe and/or donate!] (more…)

A conference sponsored by the Latter-day Saint Council on Mormon Studies, and
the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame

Held at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
March 18-19, 2011 (more…)

I am pleased to welcome fellow Yalie Melissa Proctor as the next participant in this series. Her academic journey has led her through the worlds of Near Eastern Studies, philosophy of religion, and Mormon women’s history. Her interview reflects her passionate pursuit of her interests as well as her significant contributions to the study of Mormon women. (more…)

(Cross-posted at Religion in American History)

Over at Religion Dispatches, Joanna Brooks has a two-part post asking “Who Says the Tea Party isn’t a Religious Movement?” In challenging Lou Ruprecht’s answer of “no,” Brooks notes that “for the Mormon sector of the movement (including Tea Party icon Glenn Beck), … the Tea Party taps into a powerful and distinctive complex of Mormon beliefs about the divinity of the U.S. Constitution and the last-days role of righteous souls from the Rocky Mountains in saving it from destruction.” (more…)

I’m making my way through Jeffrey Williams’s Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), an admittedly revisionist challenge to the current scholarship on early Methodism that highlights the rhetorical violence in the sermons, conversion narratives, and personal writings of Wesley’s disciples in the early American republic. I may consider posting a brief review of the book (and noting any potential avenues for research in Mormon studies it may suggest) when I complete it, but for the time being, I want to focus in on one line from the book’s foreword, authored by Catherine Albanese and Stephen Stein, editors of the Religion in North America series of which this book is a part. (more…)

This summer I am doing some freelance research for a family on one of their ancestors who edited a small community newspaper in Marion, Ohio from 1877-1883. The man, George Christian Sr., was Warren G. Hardings’ neighbor and his son became Harding’s secretary during his senatorial and abbreviated presidential years. Although Christian probably is not particularly relevant to the readership of this blog, I have been surprised to see how often Mormons make an appearance in Christian’s newspaper, the Marion Mirror. (more…)