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.

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.

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…)

The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the “official” end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South. (more…)

Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921. By Matthew C. Godfrey. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007.

Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform and Utah Coal. By Nancy J. Taniguchi. Legal History of North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Most historians are familiar with the Turner Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner’s once-dominant argument that American history was made on its margins, on the frontier, and that historians who put slavery and the east coast at the center of the nation’s past were off the mark. (more…)

In September of last year, I blogged about recent biblical scholarship that attempts to unlock the riddles presented by Genesis 9, which describes Noah’s curse upon his grandson, Canaan. Based on the work of John Sietze Bersgma and Scott Walker Hahn, (more…)

With Stephen J. Fleming

Normally articles take a back seat to monographs in terms of impact, but Lester E. Bush’s 1973 Dialogue article “Mormonisms’ Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview” stands as a master work of scholarship that not only revolutionized how historians, sociologists, and other academics view the church’s history of race relations, but was also a significant factor leading to OD 2. (more…)

Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.

On Zion’s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer’s Ph.D. dissertation (more…)

If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)

And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?

For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?

I’ve written previously on ways Mormon historians can transcend the 1890 rupture and begin to conceptualize and integrate the twentieth century into narratives of Mormon history. I suggested that one way to do this is to historicize contemporary issues, such as those surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and show how the past can illuminate the present. Some may protest that this approach is overly-presentist, but I would argue that all history is presentist to one degree or another, and as historians we should be writing histories that are useful and useable. (more…)

In preparing my priesthood lesson on baptisms for the dead for tomorrow (lesson 41), I’ve been going through the omissions from the text. As JNS pointed out awhile back, some of these omissions are pretty interesting. Here’s the text of Joseph Smith’s October 1841 speech on baptisms for the dead (more…)

18 ¶ And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. (more…)

A few minutes ago I was reading a Talking Points Memo article on the guy who took an AR-15 rifle to an Obama event earlier this month. Apparently Chris Broughton attends a fundamentalist Baptist church whose pastor Steven Anderson has prayed that Obama die and go to hell, sentiments that Broughton shares. (more…)

A year ago, almost to the day, I found myself discussing my masters’ thesis on the role of memory and persecution in shaping Mormon identity during the 1840s and 1850s with Mary Richards, a professor of history at BYU. She mentioned wryly that she enjoyed my thesis a great deal, but that she had noted my heavy reliance on the writings of Parley P. Pratt. She suggested in a joking way that perhaps I should change my title to “Parley Pratt’s Memory of Persecution.” I laughed along with her, but defended myself by saying that Pratt had written far more about the persecutions than anyone else. Historian Ken Winn agrees with me, arguing in his Exiles in a Land of Liberty that Pratt was the foremost Mormon commentator on the Missouri conflict (147). (more…)

After months of anticipation, the JI’s Christopher has successfully completed his MA thesis at BYU. The thesis examines the influence of Methodism on early Mormon history, and will doubtless be a valuable contribution. It is available on-line here and I’ve reproduced the abstract after the jump: (more…)

June 8, 1978

To all general and local priesthood officers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the world:
Dear Brethren: (more…)

After months of cajoling, Steve Fleming has finally agreed to join the Juvenile Instructor on a permanent basis. Here’s a short bio:

Stephen J. Fleming is a PhD. candidate at UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies and a 2008 Bushman fellow. Steve received his B.A. in history from BYU and his M.A. from UC Stanislaus, also in history. He would like to write a dissertation on survivals of crypto-Catholicism and resistance to disenchantment from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution. He has been published in Church History, Religion and American Culture, and Max Weber Studies, as well as various Mormon journals and he is currently revising his MA thesis, which treats Mormonism in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia and surrounding regions) for publication.

Here are the links for Steve’s guest posts:

http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/what-is-our-obligation-the-2008-bushman-seminar/

http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/science-as-a-vocation/

Join us in welcoming Steve.