In 2004, J. Spencer Fluhman joined the faculty of the department of Church History and Doctrine in the BYU Department of Religious Education (“The Religion Department” as it’s commonly known) as a full-time employee. In the interim he has rapidly gained a reputation not only for solid scholarship but for his engaging and entertaining teaching style. He recently published an important piece about Joseph Smith’s polygamy in the latest number of Mormon Historical Studies and his dissertation, “Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Antebellum America” will be published within the year. He also recently finished a term on the board of the Mormon History Association. Many of us here at the JI count Spencer as a mentor and a friend as well as a colleague.

We’re pleased to announce that this past week, Spencer was hired by the BYU department of history and will begin teaching in the fall.  Please join us in congratulating Spencer on this new chapter in his career.

David Golding is a PhD student in the History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University and a co-editor (with Loyd Ericson) of the new Claremont Journal of Mormon Studies. He has been kind enough to share a little bit about this new publishing venture and a Call for Papers. (more…)

Patrick Q. Mason. He did his graduate work at Notre Dame under George Marsden and recently published a form of his dissertation as The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Antebellum South (I have to say that the title of his dissertation, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Mob,” is pretty dang awesome). He has also published several articles of note. Apparently it won’t be official until March, but the word is now out.

Congrats, Pat. This is great news for Claremont, too.

MHA put up its quarterly newspaper this week, and there are a few items worth noting. (more…)

At the award-winning US Intellectual History Blog, David Sehat took on the monumental task of outlining the US History Canon (he had previously done a list on the 19th century here). Designed primarily as a template for a comprehensive exams reading list, it also aims to be a great source on standard debates in historiography. Here is the stated goal:

Come up with a list of truly canonical books that everyone who has gone to graduate school in U.S. history should have read. This is not just a list of intellectual and cultural history–it is supposed to include all the major works in modern U.S. history in all the different sub-specialties. In certain cases where an article was substantially the same as an important book, we added the article instead. We also left out many good books and books that would help to fill out a coherent narrative, trying instead to arrive at a truly canonical list. That is, of course, an impossible task, given the fragmentation and specialization of the historiography of the United States. But we thought it worth the effort in any case.

Of course, these types of lists are more to provoke discussion than to be a definitive statement. A so-called “canon” is more often a reflection of the compiler’s interests and background than an objective judging of the entire breadth of scholarship. (more…)

From Evangelical Christendom 12 (1870), 27.

Evangelical Christendom, published out of London, was the official journal of the World Evangelical Alliance, organized in Britain in 1846 to coordinate and promote evangelical mission work around the globe.  (An American affiliate was organized in New York City in  1847.) The journal was annual, but also comprehensive; routinely hundreds of pages long, containing book reviews, conference reports, missionary dispatches from around the globe, and a section entitled “Foreign Intelligencer,” made up of dispatches from countries around the world on the state of evangelical religion.   “Mormonism in New York and Utah” is one of these.

(more…)

Heather Olson Beal is an assistant professor of education at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She blogs at Doves and Serpents.  (Dr Olson Beal is the seventh academic profiled in the “Women in the Academy” series, which Elizabeth Pinborough started in February 2010.) (more…)

Walking through the campus of Jesus College is akin to visiting a middle age monastery. (more…)

I took a directed readings course for one of my last classes at BYU, and one of the books was about colonial New Englanders’ notions of America as a promised land. While that may seem rather innocuous, I was struck by the similarities to Mormon notions and the fact that JS would have been immersed in that culture (no getting around the fact that he would have been influenced by such ideas). When I met with the professor to discuss the book I mentioned my concern and I think he sort of made a joke. But then seeing that I still looked concerned he simply said, “it’s in the Bible.” That made me feel better.

In the process of getting comfortable with finding Mormon-looking ideas in JS’s environment, I’ve wondered why I felt this way. I think the impulse derives from the feeling that the Bible is a legitimate source, whereas other sources may not be. This is a very Protestant approach.

JS seemed to have a different approach though. (more…)

Jacob Baker and I discovered the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ while Bushman summer fellows in 2007.    We spent a lot of time kicking back and forth analysis of this most interesting schism group, and organized an MHA panel around them in 2008.    And, today, the turgid pace of academic publishing has finally reached consummation, and the paper I wrote that summer has been published in the current issue of Nova Religio 14:3 (February 2011) 42-63.

The Latter Day Church is fascinating in part because of how skillfully Matthew Philip Gill engages in prophetic mimesis, replicating the experiences and language of Joseph Smith to create himself as Smith’s heir, calling to repentance the failed church of Salt Lake City and promising a re-invigorated version of Mormon spirituality – one which both invokes Joseph Smith’s charisma anew, but which also rewrites the sacred history of Mormonism in ways that follow the cultural accommodations the LDS church has made.   Gill’s movement is neither sectarian – which seeks to heighten tension with Western culture – nor a church movement – one which seeks to lessen that tension.  Rather, scholars like Armand Mauss and Thomas O’Dea have observed that the LDS Church itself seems to combine both of these impulses, oscillating back and forth along a spectrum of resistance, tension, and accommodation.  Just so, the Latter Day Church of Christ itself seeks to heighten both resistance and accommodation – rejecting, for instance, evidence that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy and embracing whole-heartedly the LDS church’s sentimental emphasis upon the family, but also heightening the sort of radical spiritual claims which have become routinized in American Mormonism.   Gill, after all, has had visionary experiences of all the figures Joseph Smith claimed to have encountered, adding a resurrected Joseph himself into the bargain.   As his father (and first counselor) asks derisively of the LDS Church, “We have again an era of prophets.  Proper prophets.  Not people who are just put into position and over time get to be a prophet . . . Where’s the revelation in that?”    And such is a new church born. (more…)

Kim Ostman recently defended his dissertation in comparative religion  (available in full here), The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society 1840-1900 at Åbo Akademi University and has been kind enough to share with us here the opening lecture from his thesis defense. Kim explains that “the public defence of a dissertation here in Finland consists of the opening lecture, the opponent’s (in this case Douglas Davies) brief general statement, a public ‘chat’/'roasting’ between the opponent and I for 1.5-2 hours, and the opponent’s final statement on the thesis and its defence.”

Kim has published a number of important pieces on Mormonism in Finland and is an excellent example of a European scholar carrying on fascinating research on Mormonism locally.  A big congratulations on a completed dissertation and a thanks for sharing a these thoughts here at the JI. (more…)

Rachel Cope has a PhD in American History from Syracuse University and is a Professor of Church History and Doctrine in the BYU Religious Education Department. You can read more about her background in a previous post when she participated in the JI’s Women In The Academy Series. (more…)

“Church History and Doctrine has 2 or 3 faculty positions to be filled this year. Candidates can apply at https://yjobs.byu.edu. Applications will be accepted through January 21, 2011.”

Here are a few random (one that was posted recently and the others which were linked to in the subsequent discussion) posts in the Bloggernacle dealing with the BYU Religion Department: (more…)

2011 JWHA Annual Meeting Call for Papers (more…)

Last Columbus Day, I wrote a post on Mark Ashurst-McGee’s dissertation and the radical and subversive nature of the Book of Mormon. (more…)

I recently opined on the benefits of situating the rise of Mormonism within the larger historical context of the (late) early modern Atlantic world. I would like now to briefly outline one example of what such an approach might look like.  (more…)

The Mormon History Association is pleased to announce the following award competitions, including the new Silver Award for Mormon Women’s History. Submissions for each category must be received by February 15, 2011 at the respective email addresses indicated below. (more…)

I recently finished reading Protestant Empire, Carla Pestana’s rich survey of the role religion played in the establishment and development of the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (more…)

*Updates in comments 7, 11, 25, 27, 30 and 32. Also, in the Signature Books section I’ve added anticipated release dates for forthcoming publications provided by the publisher.*

Last year I put together, with help from a number of publishers, booksellers, and friends, a list of forthcoming and recently published books on Mormon history.  Most of those books highlighted last year have indeed found a place on bookshelves, so it’s about time to do it again.  There are some exciting books that have recently come off the press and which are still forthcoming. Ben did a good job last week of mentioning some highlights from recent publications, so I’m going a bit light on the “recently published” aspect of this list. Generally speaking, the books that were on last years list and have been published I will not list here.  As always, I’m sure I missed some titles, so if you know of others or have heard rumors of other forthcoming books/projects, please leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. (more…)

[As a heads-up, this post does not attempt to make any claims or arguments. It's just a few half-baked thoughts concerning early Mormon notions of the Kingdom of God and how it related to Americanism, specifically during the 1840s. I hope it generates some discussion--or, at least--encourages some thought on what I think may be an under-utilized approach to early Mormon history.]

It’s almost considered a common trope nowadays to describe Mormonism as “the quintessential American religion”–or something in those regards. Harold Bloom may be most famous for recently making such a claim, but the sentiment has been around a long time. An American-born prophet, an American-located Garden of Eden, a canonized revelation extolling the American Constitution, an American-centered headquarters–you get the idea. The question of how Mormons in the nineteenth century understood their relationship with the United States has received a lot of attention in recent decades, with good reason. It is a fascinating story of how Mormons both rejected America—by becoming fed up with persecution and mobocracy and moving West—while still holding the pure “ideal” of America and merely equating their contemporary nation as experiencing an apostasy akin to modern-day Christianity. Mormon scriptures both placed America the location at the center of future divine events while also prophesying the downfall of America the government as a necessary apocalyptic sign paving the way for the millennium. The paradoxical positioning of both rejecting and embracing the American image was at the center of the Mormon sense of self during the late-Nauvoo and early-Utah periods. (more…)