Fire and Sword: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri, 1836-1839, by Leland Homer Gentry and Todd M. Compton. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2010.

Leland H. Gentry’s 1965 dissertation “A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri, 1836-1839” was part of a wave of new Mormon scholarship of the 1960s that sought to reinterpret Mormon history in more academic terms, avoiding the polarities of the “traditional” anti-Mormon/pro-Mormon battles of the 19th and early 20th century. After reviewing the literature on Mormon Missouri during the late 1830s, Gentry noted in his introduction that (more…)

Recently, I’ve been think about how ordinary members use church history in their everyday lives. In my limited experience, few members read much church history, especially if it wasn’t published by Deseret Books. I realize this isn’t news to anyone reading this blog, as we’ve discussed in several of Ben’s recent posts why many church members resist more academically-oriented literature if it challenges accepted oral traditions, is seen as unaccessible due to academic prose and/or jargon, among other reasons. But I’ve wondered what more we could be doing to encourage ward members to see the benefits of incorporating more academic history into their busy schedules. (more…)

With Romney drawing increased attention to Mormonism in American life, I’ve wondered how much to bring Mormon history into my US history survey courses. I’m currently teaching the first half, and he’s come up a couple of times when discussing religious tests for the presidency (I first mention JFK’s Catholicism, which most of my students have heard about, and then I ask which contemporary candidate is having problems with his religion, and at least a few students are aware of opposition to Romney’s Mormonism). (more…)

Joseph Smith Papers Project Internship-Church History Department

Purpose

The Church History Department announces an opening for a one-year internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project. This will be a full-time temporary position beginning in October 2011. (more…)

A few of us at the blog have started teaching our own courses, so we’re thinking more about teaching than as a blog we’ve done in the past. So I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts discussing how we’d design a college course on early Mormonism. I picked early Mormonism because it’s something most of the permas are familiar with, even if it’s not our primary area of study. And most of our non-academic readership also knows a fair amount about this period. So let’s start with organizing the weekly topics. At my university, we’re on a sixteen-week schedule per semester, so here’s how I would do it: (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…)

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…)

Last week my wife and I spent five days conducting field research for my dissertation in the National Archives, Central Plains Region branch in Kansas City, Missouri. Although I’m not writing on a Mormon topic, we flagged anything that might have a Mormon connection in the Bureau of Indian Affairs files we were examining. On Friday, my wife Hope turned to me with an excited look on her face, and handed me this piece of paper: (more…)

Kris W. contributed to our Women’s History at JI series last month, and we liked her post so well we asked her to be a permanent contributor. As stated on the other post, Kris has a M.A. in History from The University of Western Ontario and she has co-authored three articles with Jonathan Stapley on Mormon healing rituals. An emeritus permablogger at BCC, Kris brings much needed expertise in healing rituals, women, gender, and material religion. Please join us in welcoming Kris! (more…)

In the late 1960s, a black woman named Wynetta Martin joined the church in California, finding in Mormonism a loving God with whom she could identify. Martin moved to Utah at a time when the church was seeking to diversify its public face in response to boycotts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and BYU. It was therefore a combination of her own tenacity as an individual (she drove all night from Los Angeles to make her audition) and the church’s need to adapt to changing circumstances that allowed Martin to become the first African American member of the Tabernacle Choir and the first black instructor at BYU (she taught classes on “Black Culture” in the Nursing department). (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.

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…)

Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887. By Scott R. Christensen. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999.

Scott R. Christensen has written a landmark biography of Sagwitch, the Northwestern Shoshone chief who converted to Mormonism a few years after the Bear River Massacre of 1863. Sagwitch (1822-1887) witnessed one of the most transformative periods in the history of the North American West, when European and then American colonial powers incorporated Shoshone homelands into colonial and global economies. Sagwitch himself was a survivor of the incredible violence that American expansion entailed, somehow escaping when over three hundred members of his band were slaughtered by U.S. troops stationed at Fort Douglas in January 1863. For over two decades following the massacre, Sagwitch sought to rebuild his people within the religio-cultural milieu of Mormonism. Christensen has done an admirable job, utilizing ethnohistorical techniques, combining oral histories with Sagwitch’s descendants, a rich array of images, and archival materials. (more…)

Like much of Joseph Smith’s thought, his understanding of the priesthood did not emerge all at once in 1820 (or, for that matter, in 1829). As Greg Prince has shown, the earliest Mormons did not think in terms of “priesthood” like later Latter-day Saints would understand it–as a broad umbrella term that included multiple offices. This understanding did not come about until 1835, with D&C 107 (see WVS’s fantastic series on D&C 107, especially part 6). Instead, they thought of offices with varying responsibilities and duties. The early church (1829-1830) included the offices of elders, priests, and teachers, with bishops, high priests, and deacons being added in 1831. However, Prince also suggests that the Book of Mormon and documents from 1829-1830 indicate that early Mormons understood an implied distinction between the authority of elders and the authority of priests and teachers (Power from on High, 12, 27; contrast Quinn, Origins of Power, 289n137, who does not accept this early, implied division). (more…)

Despite being a member of the first Quorum of the Twelve, to most members of the church today William E. McLellin, if he’s known at all, is associated primarily with D&C 67. The revelation was received at the November 1831 conference, where the publication of Joseph Smith’s revelations was discussed in detail. (more…)

Ezra Booth, a former Methodist minister, he converted to Mormonism in 1831 after witnessing a miraculous healing performed by Joseph Smith. Booth initially found the Mormon message very compelling, especially the promise of spiritual gifts and the imminent establishment of the New Jerusalem. But as months passed, Booth found the gap between expectation and result to widen, as in his mind the spiritual gifts did not come in the manner he hoped and the site of the New Jerusalem in Missouri (see D&C 57) was not the land of milk and honey he envisioned (as described in D&C 38:18). He also didn’t like the June 1831 (D&C 52) commandment to walk to Missouri for the dedication of the temple site, or the August 1831 commandment to walk back to Ohio (D&C 60), preaching along the way (at 800 miles one way, I wonder how many people actually liked the thought of that), and he became increasingly critical of JS and other Mormon leaders. In early September, the church conference silenced Booth from preaching, and over the next few months he published a series of letters in the local newspaper, the Ohio Star. (more…)

Although the Book of Mormon never explicitly names Christopher Columbus, many readers have supposed that 1 Nephi 13:12 refers to he who “sailed the ocean blue” in 1492. The chapter also seems to provide a theological justification for the European conquest of the Americas that followed in the wake of Columbus’ voyage (vv. 14-15; compare 2 Nephi 1:11; Mormon 5:19; 3 Nephi 16:9; see also 16:8; 2 Nephi 26:15). In this, the Book of Mormon does not vary that drastically from ideas then prevalent in the broader American society that justified the expansion of European settler societies across the continent, the concomitant decline of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and their absorption into white society. (more…)

We must be in the “dog days of summer,” as the blog has been rather slow of late. But I thought I’d point our readers to a great series that I just became aware of, called “The Future of Mormonism,” over at Patheos. It has several posts discussing different aspects of Mormonism, written by prominent scholars and bloggers. They’re all worth checking out: (more…)

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.