In conclusion: Mormon horns have piles of company and most of the folks keeping the idea were (probably still are) Mormon themselves. (more…)

To avoid either dragging out this series inordinately or clogging up The Mormon Archipelago, I’ve broken a seven-part run into three posts with links to sub-pages. The links (to date) are below. (more…)

Last year I put up several posts about the construction and assignment of Mormon identity through the naming of animals, plants, places, etc. In the same vein, I hope to spend a few posts examining horns in a Mormon context.

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Below is my contribution to the travels of the Mormon History Association’s presidential seer stone. (more…)

In 1898 the Improvement Era introduced a three-page description of suttee with the following explanation:

In years past the Latter-day Saints were frequently referred to the suppression of the SUTTEE in India by act of the British Parliament, as a precedent and justification of certain congressional enactments…. [W]e thought perhaps a description…would be of interest to our readers. [1]

They weren’t kidding about the “frequently.” (more…)

Moving onward, ever onward, through the simile and metaphor zoo, we arrive at Bos primigenius, “civilization’s most important animal,” the cow. [1] Mormonism’s pre-eminent bovine octet first lumbered across a public screen in 1969 when Johnny Lingo used them to buy a bride, perpetuate his culture’s patriarchal commodification of women, and teach us that if we’re nice and/or Machiavellian enough we’ll get a hot wife. Or something. [2] Fittingly for a Mormon-produced film, plurality dominated the plot. (more…)

In my effort to understand Mormons’ cultural position by studying names applied to them, I recently encountered an unfamiliar epithet:

Bluebeard asks for a seat in the Senate. He stands with one hand locking the door of his chamber of horrors, and with the other he knocks for admission to the supreme legislative assembly of the foremost Christian republic of all time….

How large is the territory over which the Mormon Bluebeard exercises sway? …[two paragraphs describing the Great Basin] …The American Bluebeard rules over the American Potosi. [1]

The flower genus Caryopteris goes colloquially by “bluebeard” (See Figure 1: C. incana). So far as I know, however, no one compared Mormons to vicious flowers. The name “Bluebeard” comes from a French fairy-tale, “La Barbe-bleue [The Blue-beard],” that Charles Perrault published in 1697. [2] In the story, a young woman marries a rich nobleman despite his cerulean whiskers, which make him “frightful and ugly.” [3] Afterwards, he gives her all the keys, forbids her to enter one particular room, and leaves on (supposed) business. Then, as later made into a nursery rhyme (!) (more…)

In a previous post, I quoted an entomologist who thought the name “Mormon Fly” was “an insolvable mystery.” [1] He went on to say that “there was somewhat more plausible ground for calling the Chinch bug the ‘Mormon louse;’ for that little pest really did swarm for the first time in Illinois about the same year that the Mormons settled there.” (more…)

All that is green west of the Rockies quivers before that most fearsome of Mormon beasts, the Mormon cricket. It wasn’t always so. Before the 1870s (in the Anglo-European world), mesch, “a curious kind of cricket,” “an ugly cricket,” “a large kind of cricket,” the “mountain cricket” ravaged the left side of the American map. [1] Colonel Kane and the Mormons described it:

Wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock-spring, and with a general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing him to a cross of the spider on the Buffalo, the Deseret cricket comes down from the mountains at a certain season of the year, in voracious and desolating myriads. [3]

As you’ve probably grown tired of hearing, the Mormon cricket isn’t really a cricket. It’s a katydid sporting the genus name Anabrus, “in allusion to [its] unprepossessing appearance”; an + abroV = “not soft, delicate, tender, dainty, or beautiful,” which I think fits pretty well. [4] (Image: A. simplex cannibalizes [2]) (more…)

An 1840s British visitor to Illinois noted that “among the novel discomforts of the West, that of insects is one of no trifling character. The whole earth and air seems teeming with them….” [1] A big bunch of them, including mayflies, teemed at Nauvoo. (more…)

In a post earlier today, Chris asked about instances when Mormons defended polygamy by attacking sexual relations between races. I have been working on racial construction by Mormons and non-Mormons in the late 1880s to 1890s and happen to have two pieces ready to go. They would be too long for a comment, so I’m posting them here. (more…)

Fraternity with monkeys was (and remains) a standard trope of racializing discourse. So, in my ongoing efforts to (a) understand late nineteenth-century Mormon identity construction and (b) graduate, I poked around for comparisons between Mormons and animals in the 19^th century. I was pretty excited when I found a baboon labeled “mormon.” I thought that, together with Mormon crickets, I had a high-protein entrée for my thesis. I mean, if I were manufacturing monstrosities for 19^th-century anti-Mormons, it would be hard to beat the prolific, ravenous, cannibalistic Mormon cricket and a certified Mormon, polygamous baboon. (more…)

Almost everyone with the least smidge of north-of-the-Rio-Grande Mormon exposure knows that, in a Mormon context, “Happy Valley” means… well, not everyone agrees. (more…)

Apropos of nothing: some numbers about millennial temples. To justify its place at JI, let’s call it an exercise in evaluating an agent’s perspective. (more…)

At the MHA conference a few weeks ago, an associate asked if I, as a never-married LDS male, were “hyper-aware” of single women at MHA. [1] I gave my standard spiel: I want to marry; feel strong social pressure to do so; and am into my third decade of post-pubertal celibacy and therefore am always aware of who does and does not wear a wedding/engagement ring. (more…)

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, jolly new semester, usw. to all. I’m still working on (read: doing stuff higher on my priority list at the expense of) the last installments of the “Reading Like a Conspiracy Theorist” series. In that direction, however, I give you a “cage match”: I put two articles in a steel cage with suitable quantities of folding chairs and then observed the results. (more…)

As an academic historian (in training), when I write about the dead for work or for the Juvenile Instructor, I don methodological goggles, like naturalism, skepticism, how-will-this-affect-my-careerism, and any-color-but-rose-ism. When finished, however, I remove those goggles, storing them safely on my utility belt for future use. Today, in this time of thanksgiving, I approach the blog and the dead we study with a set of lenses I normally use only in private or at church. (more…)

As I explained in earlier posts, I’m not the first to discover that Mission President James G. Duffin married Sister Missionary Amelia B. Carling in 1902 while she was still a missionary. D. Michael Quinn identified Duffin as a polygamist in 1985 and B. Carmon Hardy did so in 1992. This post will update details of both publications. (more…)

I’ve put together the “case” for the Duffin-Carling polygamy as an exercise in diary reading. (For the previous installment, see here.) (more…)

The old news: Some “orthodox” polygamy continued after the 1890 Manifesto. James G. Duffin, president of the Southwestern/Central States Mission from 1900 to 1906, and Amelia B. Carling, one of the early full-time, full-length single-sister missionaries (1901–1902), married polygamously in 1902. [1]

The new news: Duffin and Carling courted while she was a missionary under his supervision; their marriage took place before her release or immediately thereafter. (I assume Quinn knew it, but I haven’t found a publication pointing out this (more…)