So I decided to read Robert Ritner’s “The Breathing of Hor among the Joseph Smith Papyri,” [1] for reasons I’ll discuss below. Wow. Where do I begin? As I’ve mentioned several times, I’m working on late Neoplatonic influence on early Mormonism and the primary innovations that the late Neoplatonists made to Neoplatonism was theurgy. To learn theurgy, Iamblichus spent considerable time studying in Egypt; Egyptians ritual played a significant role in Imablichus’s ritual theology. In fact, Iamblichus wrote his De Mysteriis (the principal exposition on theurgy) as “Master Abamon,” an Egyptian priest.[2] (more…)

From The Archives: (more…)

There was once time when historians of LDS history were forced to rely on BH Roberts’s Documentary History of the Church—commonly known today as History of the Church (hereafter referred to as HC). Put crudely, the HC is a heavily-edited and problematic documentary history of a heavily-edited and problematic documentary history. This 7-volume series—the first volume printed in 1903—has been very significant. They are probably amongst the most read and referenced history texts read by Latter-day Saints, they are largely influential in Church curriculum (just note their presence in D&C section headers), and they have even been foundational for many scholarly monographs. This was especially the case before the Church opened up it’s numerous archival sources, as even Fawn Brodie based much of her Joseph Smith narrative on these books. (more…)

From the event announcement at USU.

Richard V. Francaviglia, a former university professor and administrator, now an independent consultant and researcher, has been selected to present the 17th annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture. (more…)

I’ve been just waiting for someone to get gutsy and rash enough, in the wake of Warren Jeff’s sexual assault convictions, to try a side-by-side, cross-historical comparison of Jeff’s polygamy with that Joseph Smith. Given the state of the public mind – inebriated as ever with the subject of polygamy and whetted by Big Love, Sister Wives, and now the salacious Jeff’s trial – it was only a matter of time. In his rather pitiable defense, Jeffs gave a rehearsal of Mormon religious persecution, ran through a sort of FLDS catechism, and made gestures toward Joseph Smith.

Peggy Fletcher Stack’s article this week comparing Jeffs and Joseph Smith (“Comparing Mormon founder, FLDS leader on polygamy,” Salt Lake Tribune, 08.19) was perfectly suited to the public appetite. The piece, headed by the provocative artwork below, pits the revulsion that many feel toward Jeffs’ foul crimes against the deep admiration that many Latter-day Saints feel for the Prophet Joseph Smith. It deftly exploits, as good journalists know to do, some of the strongest currents in the cultural atmosphere, and the effect is a visceral one. Stack unabashedly sits Joseph Smith and Warren Jeffs side by side in a parity that will make most Mormons flinch. (more…)

The scholar/blogger Historiann (if you are a young Mormon scholar interested in academia, you should really read her blog) has a new post on the ethics of conference participating. Partly because I am lazy, and partly because I think we can generate a good discussion, I’d like to bring part of that debate over here. (more…)

The Tanner Humanities Center is proud to present
the 2011 David P. Gardner Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts

Please join us for a lecture by 

Richard Bushman (more…)

We are thrilled that Susanna Morrill, assistant professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College, has been kind enough to share her insights on the visionary culture of early LDS women here at the JI. Susanna’s article “Relief Society Birth and Death Rituals: Women at the Gates of Mortality,” Journal of Mormon History, 36 (Spring 2010), 128–59 as well as her book, White Roses on the Floor of Heaven: Nature and Flower Imagery in Latter-day Saints Women’s Literature, 1880-1920 have garnered wide praise. Let’s give Susanna a warm welcome.

In 2003, faithful LDS member Stephenie Meyer dreamed of a girl and a beautiful, sparkly vampire boy, in love and having an intense conversation in a meadow. Meyer could not get the dream out of her head. Whenever she could get a chance, she wrote a story inspired by the dream. It became the first book in the Twilight series. Meyer described this experience: “To be honest, I felt like I was guided through the process.”[i] (more…)

Continued from Part I.

Sarah Reed, “Fantasy, Fraud, and Freud: The Uncanny Gold Plates in 19th Century Newspaper Accounts.” Sarah, a graduate student in German studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had the honor of bringing Freud to the party. Specifically, she explored the debates surrounding the Gold Plates through the lens of Freud’s “uncanny,” the idea that a thing or concept can be both familiar and foreign at the same time. Sarah examined how newspaper accounts presented Joseph Smith’s narrative—which in itself possessed many home-grown or native elements—in a way that repressed the familiar and emphasized the exotic. Attackers often contrasted JS’s message with Enlightenment ideals, thereby creating a safe distance between the Mormons and the audience. Fun stuff. (more…)

Clement of Alexandria asserted that Plato was an important precursor to the coming of Christ. [1] The quotes I post from Plato here suggest that Mormons could sympathize with Clement’s point of view. The first is Plato’s statement on deification from the Theaetetus. (more…)

The Mormon Scholars Foundation Summer Seminar, founded by Richard Bushman and recently co-directed with Terryl Givens, has a tradition of gathering the brightest young Mormon scholars for six weeks to research, engage, and present on specific themes or periods. This year’s group was no exception. A dozen participants ranging from an undergraduate majoring in engineering to an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies (our own SC Taysom!) gathered together to explore the theme, “The Cultural History of the Gold Plates.” I had the great privilege to attend their presentations today, and what follows is my brief recap, broken into two parts. (more…)

Neilson, Reid L. Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan, 1901-1924. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010

Dr. Reid L. Neilson, managing director of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s history department, has written a fascinating account of the Mormon Japanese Mission at the turn of the 20^th century. Neilson argues that the 19^th century LDS missionary experience in the United States and Europe had calcified Mormon evangelizing strategies to a degree that ultimately determined their failure in the rapidly modernizing Japanese nation. While Neilson’s trajectory often wades a little shallow and missionary-centric, his transnational gaze at Mormon mission policy and practice, while situating his study in a comparative Christian missionary framework, offers important inroads for scholars of Mormon history who have too often found themselves mired in the nineteenth century American origins story of a 21^st century global church. (more…)

Call for Papers

The History of Mormonism in Latin America and the U. S.-Mexico Borderlands

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a conference on the history of Mormonism in Latin America and the U.S. Mexico Borderlands to be held in El Paso, Texas on July 28, 2012 in conjunction with a 100^th Anniversary Commemoration of the “Exodus” of settlers from the Mormon Colonies in northern Mexico to the United States. (more…)

III Brazilian Mormon Studies Conference
Annual Conference of the Associação Brasileira de Estudos Mórmons (Brazilian Mormon Studies Association—ABEM)
January 28, 2012
São Paulo, Brazil

Call for papers

“Mormonism and its relationship with other denominations” (more…)

(cross-posted at Religion in American History)

The latest issue of Religion and American Culture arrived in my mailbox last week, and I was excited to see the first article dealt with a topic sure to interest JI readers: “‘Until This Curse of Polygamy Is Wiped Out’: Black Methodists, White Mormons, and Constructions of Racial Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century,” written by James B. Bennett, associate professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University.  (more…)

Call For Papers: 2012 Mormon History Association Conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on June 28-July1, 2012

“Mormonism in its Expanding Global Context: Invitations to New Interpretations and Understandings.” (more…)

A couple of days ago, I received via email a link to an early draft of the lineup for the American Society of Church History’s Winter Meeting (held in conjunction with AHA’s annual meeting, Jan. 5-8, 2012 in Chicago). The program draft can be viewed in its entirety here, but I thought I’d highlight a few papers and sessions that might be of interest to JI’s readers (relevant papers and sessions in blue), followed by my own brief commentary on each: (more…)

This last week, FAIR went live with their Mormon Defense League website.[1] Among the “false claims” the website seeks to debunk concern the LDS Church’s current relationship to polygamy. In an effort to distinguish the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from polygamous groups in the western United States, the MDL emphasized that plural marriage was a limited practice that had been officially stopped over a century ago. (Including perpetuating the unfortunate rhetorical battle over the label “Mormon”–a battle of deep irony when considering our frustration of others refusing us the label “Christian.”) To answer the question of the number of Mormons who practiced polygamy, it replied that “modern estimates of LDS members practicing polygamy prior to 1904 range between 2% and 20%.” While the website does admit that it is tough to get an accurate number, and that it depends on who you count within the statistics, their final number (2% to 20%) is unfortunate in that it is not only false but misleading. (more…)

In Claudia Bushman’s 2010 article for Dialogue, “Should Mormon Women Speak Out?” 41 (1): 171-184 – and by the way, the answer is yes – she writes,

I grew up in the Church but knew nothing of LDS women’s history. I did not know that the Relief Society operated cooperative stores, spun and wove silk fabric (including hatching the silkworms from eggs and feeding them on mulberry leaves that they gathered by hand), gleaned the fields to save grain for bad times, and trained as midwives and doctors. I didn’t know that they were the first women in the United States to vote, even though Wyoming’s women were first to receive the right to vote. I didn’t know that they edited their own excellent newspaper or that they had large meetings when they spoke up for their rights and beliefs as citizens and as Mormons. Finding all this out was part of our Boston women’s study [in the 1970s]. One of our women discovered bound volumes of the Woman’s Exponent, the newspaper edited by Lula Greene Richards and Emmeline B. Wells (1872–1914) in the Harvard library. She copied out sections; and we found in our foremothers who spoke out the models we were searching for in our own lives.

What strikes me about this observation is how true it STILL is, even in 2011. (more…)

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry surrounded a group of ninety Minneconjou Lakota men just west of Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The wives and children of the Lakota warriors were camped a few yards to the south of the council ground. The Cavalry was engaged in disarming the warriors, who military leaders believed were part of a wide-ranging indigenous conspiracy to push back white settlement. The Lakota men were known to be adherents of the Ghost Dance, a religious phenomenon that originated with the Paiute prophet Wovoka in Nevada and had spread from the Great Basin to the Plains in 1889-1890. During the disarming, a struggle ensued between the troopers and a young Lakota who thought he could hide his rifle under his blanket, and a shot fired into the air. Chaos—and death—followed, as the five hundred members of the Seventh Cavalry proceeded to slaughter not only the by-then largely disarmed men but also the women and children as they fled the scene. Although exact numbers are unknown, perhaps as many as three hundred Lakotas died. It was shown in the aftermath of Wounded Knee that the Ghost Dance was not a broad-based scheme to overthrow U.S. authority, and, more to the point, that most if not all of the Lakotas who lost their lives on December 29, 1890 had died innocently after surrendering without resistance.[1] Although Latter-day Saints had nothing to do with the massacre at Wounded Knee, since 1890 commentators have speculated that Mormons were somehow connected and even the primary movers behind the Ghost Dance movement. (more…)

We’re absolutely thrilled to introduce and welcome Tona Hangen as our latest guest blogger here at the Juvenile Instructor. Tona introduces herself thus: (more…)

In the wake of the successful nationwide broadcast of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons on the Documentary Channel, the political website The Daily Beast interviewed the film’s co-producer (and director and star, etc.) Darius Gray to highlight the documentary and the place of blacks in the church. Here are a few snippits: (more…)

Steve Fleming and I are currently working on a paper examining early Latter-day Saint understandings of what Mormons today refer to as “the Great Apostasy.” Among other things, we are looking at sustained treatments of the subject authored by early Mormons (defined for our purposes here as works written and/or published between 1830 and 1850). While Steve and I feel like we have a pretty good grasp of the most obvious sources, we want to make sure we have all of our bases covered, and that’s where we need your help. What essays, books, pamphlets, etc. attempted to examine the history of the Christian church and/or the apostasy of the early Christian church? Here are a few we’ve already identified: (more…)

We received the following from our good friends at Historic Sites Committee. A few of us JIers (both past and present) have interned with Historic Sites and can attest to the fantastic environment, wonderful people, and important work involved in their projects.

_______________________________

Purposes: The Church History Department is currently looking for candidates for the position of Historic Sites Curator in the Museums & Historic Sites Division. This individual will assist in identifying, researching, preserving, restoring, and interpreting historic sites significant to the history of the Church.

Work will include: intensive historical research, master planning, large-scale collaborative development projects, interpretive message and exhibit design, interpretive curriculum development, websites, and global outreach. Much of the Historic Sites Curator’s work will bear the imprimatur of the Church and must be of the highest quality and integrity. (more…)