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…)

Curbelo, Néstor.  The History of the Mormons in Argentina.  Translated by Erin Jennings.  Salt Lake City:  Greg Kofford Books.

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Over the past few years I have gone through a few large Mormon history research collections, including the Kenney Collection at BYU, the Stanley Ivins Collection at the Utah State Historical Society, and the D. Michael Quinn Collection at Yale.  All of these collections have yielded immense amounts of information that I probably would not have come across elsewhere.  The Kenney Collection contains boxes of notes from the First Presidency Papers, General Auxiliary Organization Board Minutes, and other materials that are restricted at the Church Archives.  While the Ivins Collection does not contain as much information from restricted collections at the Church Archives, it is an important collection of notes from diaries and books written by people who visited Utah during the nineteenth century, many of which are obscure.  And the Quinn Papers contain what is perhaps the gold mine of information from restricted Mormon archival materials, with notes from General Authority diaries, Quorum of the Twelve and Seventies Minutes, and notes from a vast number of other important Mormon sources. (more…)

A few months back, I wrote a general post about the little known Religion Class program which lasted from 1890 to 1929.[1] One of the responses to this post noted the role of gender in this male-led program’s dissolution in favor of the female-led Primary program.  (more…)

I recently spent some time going through nineteenth century newspaper accounts of the death of Brigham Young. One thing that I found shocking was that many of these eastern newspapers, in telling about Polygamy, wrote that Brigham had come up with the idea after he became the leader of the Church and had then attributed it to Joseph Smith. (more…)

Through my work as a researcher for the Education in Zion Project at BYU, I have become acquainted with one of the lesser known auxiliaries of the Church called the Religion Class program. To date, the only substantial work on the classes was an article written by Michael Quinn for the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1975. Other authors like Thomas Alexander (Mormonism in Transition) and Scott Esplin (Education in Transition, Ph.D. Dissertation 2006) have briefly dealt with the classes, but their treatments of the subject have remained limited. Considering the fact that the Religion Classes were an important auxiliary of the Church for nearly 40 years (1890 to 1929), this whole in our history seems quite remarkable. In my research for BYU and my thesis research, I have found the classes to play an important role in transition era Mormonism and turn-of-the-century Utah. Hence, I thought I would provide you all with a brief overview of some of the important aspects of this interesting auxiliary. (more…)

In recent years there has been a consistent effort on the part of Church members to provide a renewed influence on the efforts and contributions of Emma Smith. For my part, I have been encouraged to see the softening of the rhetoric which surrounded her and these efforts to understand the post-martyrdom Emma. (more…)

About a year ago, I was talking with a friend about the state of Mormon history. He mentioned that he felt that one of the problems with Mormon history was that so many historians emphasized nineteenth century Mormonism, with a particular emphasis upon the Joseph Smith years. He then told me that he thought that the future of Mormon history would be in the field of twentieth century Mormon history. (more…)