I feel like I’m the bearer of bad news lately. It has come to my attention that George P. Lee, the most famous product of the great surge of LDS interest in Native Americans that defined much of the post-World War II era, died this week in Provo. (more…)

Peggy Pascoe, a leading historian of sexuality, gender and race relations in the American West, recently passed away after a bout with ovarian cancer. Her research and career path resulted in a few Mormon connections. Pascoe’s first major work, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 examined Protestant female missionaries who established homes throughout the West to “reform” and help wayward women. One of her case studies included a home set up in Salt Lake City to help Mormon women who wished to escape from polygamy. The book remains one of the most influential and important books published on women in the West. Pascoe also published her magisterial What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, which treated miscegenation law broadly from Reconstruction through the late 20th century. Although What Comes Naturally does not include discussions of Mormons, the work includes important information that contextualizes our own troubled history with intermarriage. Pascoe’s other Mormon connection comes from her having taught at the University of Utah for a decade from 1986 to 1996. She’ll be missed.

A friend alerted me not too long ago to an effort by a local in San Antonio, Texas to document the history of the LDS Church in his city.  The site is called, The Saints of San Antonio: A Video History in Their Own Words. (more…)

As promised, former JI blogger Elizabeth has teamed up with two other bright and thoughtful young historians of American religion to create a new and sorely needed blog. We are pleased to announce and endorse Scholaristas, a blog devoted to the study of women’s religious history by women. The bloggers describe themselves and their blog as follows:

(more…)

Desidrius Erasmus was the most learned man of his day and in the spirit of the Renaissance he sought to get back to the original sources of wisdom (often called Christian Humanism). For Erasmus this meant the Fathers over the Scholastics, Origin over Augustine and, of course, the Greek Bible (which he translated into Latin) over all. Said Erasmus (in a 16th century English translation) “I wold to god they were translated in to the tonges of all men, so that they might not only be read and knowne of the scotes and yrishmen, but also of the Turkes and sarracenes … I wold to god the plowman wold singe a texte of the scripture at his plowbeme.” [1]

This sentiment tends to be credited to William Tyndale the father of the English Bible: (more…)

Read more here.

Without the full text* it is hard to assess the totality of what Elder Jensen sought to convey, but the report suggests a deviation from the standard Pioneer Day fare and an effort to reach out a hand of compassion and remembrance to those that are so often the forgotten or misremembered [see yesterday's post by David G. on Pioneer Day and remembering/forgetting Utah's Indian Wars] in Utah Pioneer history. One section from the report stands out to me: (more…)

On Pioneer Day in 1941, the Provo branch of the Sons and Daughters of the Utah Pioneers erected a monument to honor the Ute Chief Sowiette for the aid he gave to Mormon settlements in early territorial Utah. The monument, which stands at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Provo, has the following inscription: (more…)

For my nightly and Sunday reading, I’ve recently decided to read academic biographies of Latter-day Saints. I’ve now finished Ron Walker’s Qualities That Count: Heber J. Grant as Businessman, Missionary, and Apostle, Arrington’s Brigham Young: American Moses, Brooks’ John D. Lee: Zealot, Pioneer, Builder, Scapegoat, Scott R. Christensen’s Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftan, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887, and I’m currently working through Allen’s No Toil Nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton. While I’ve enjoyed all of them, I think Allen’s is an extraordinary piece of scholarship, solidly researched and engagingly written. Aside from Bushman and Prince’s bios of JS and DOM, which I assume most JI readers are familiar with, what do y’all think are the “best LDS biographies”? For my purposes, I’m interested in works written by academic historians that are both well researched and written, rather than more devotional examples like George Q. Cannon’s JS bio.

The newest issue of the JMH is here. Since I don’t have a lot of time, I’ll give a taste right now of what’s in here by posting the table of contents. Forgive the watermark. I’ll have more on the content later. (more…)

We’ve discussed before the changing place of Brigham Young in scholarly discourses. For academics during much of the twentieth century, Young was far more interesting that Joseph Smith in the panorama of American history. In most of these works, Young was lauded for his organizational prowess and his intrepid leadership on the frontier. He was also seen as the savior of Mormonism, the great leader who picked up the pieces after Joseph Smith’s death. This image of Young fit the needs of American historians who, following Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that the essence of America was found on the frontier. Although academic interest in the frontier had waned by the 1980s, and with it much of the interest in Young as a frontiersman, it was in that decade that Leonard Arrington published his landmark study of the American Moses. (more…)

[To continue my attempt to post something without much work on my part, what follows is the introduction to my recent article, just put online by the Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. I post this also to encourage other graduate students to consider submitting to IMW Journal in the future; while it is a student-run production, it boasts an impressive academic review board with professional and respected scholars to help improve your submission; I received great feedback on my earlier drafts that significantly improved the article. To view the articles from the most recent issue, as well as to see submission guidelines,  click here.]

“An angel of God never has wings,” proclaimed Joseph Smith in 1839, just as the LDS Church was establishing itself in what would come to be known as Nauvoo, Illinois. (more…)

A lot of people would say no, (more…)

I knew something was up when my wife’s high-school Spanish teacher came by. “I feel like I’m losing a daughter.” We were in my wife’s hometown of Sonora, California, one week before our wedding. Even before we started dating I learned that my wife was an only child of divorced hippy parents. “Great,” I thought, “no pressure to be a high achieving son-in-law.” Little did I know… (more…)

I’ve argued around here that we Mormons have tended to borrow the Protestant metanarrative of history in seeking to lay out how we get from Apostasy to Restoration: early Catholics corrupt the church, on come the dark ages, Luther brings light back into the world by focusing on the scriptures and breaking with the wicked pope, setting the stage for the Restoration.

A little more autobiography if you’ll indulge me. (more…)

I meant to do this back in May for the year anniversary of Madsen’s passing (May 28, 2009), but late is better than never. I grew up with long family vacations, often these were to historical sites related to the Church, and without fail, a staple of those trips were Truman G. Madsen’s lectures on Joseph Smith. I can still remember at 3 or 4 a.m. while one of my parents took turns driving, laying down on the floor of our large van and listening to Madsen talk of the First Vision. (See J. Stapley’s review of the Illustrated version of his book based on some of those lectures.) Those lectures early on piqued an interest in me, a hunger, which has yet to be sated, and which I hope never will be. (more…)

The Mormon Scholars Foundation Summer Seminar, hosted by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, under the direction of Richard Bushman and taught by Terryl Givens, will present the quasi-annual MSF Symposium.

Date:  Thursday, July 8.

Location: Auditorium of the McKay Building, BYU Campus [Building number 59 on this map] (more…)

Bever, Edward. The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.

I read this book recently at the recommendation of my adviser, Ann Taves, because she is now focused on the cognitive science aspect of religion. This book is an attempt by Bever, a historian by training, to apply some of the cognitive science methods to the study of early modern witchcraft. This review is a little long but I thought it suggested a number of interesting approaches for the study of supernatural beliefs in a historical setting. (more…)