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One of Max Weber’s more evocative phrases is the “disenchantment of the world.” I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.
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The following emerges from the office of one of our readers, who currently teaches American history at a university in a state that rhymes with ‘Nassachusetts.’
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The facts are these: (more…)

Given our blog’s audience, this year’s theme and location seems oddly appropriate. Feel free to use the thread to assemble panels.

Call for Papers for SHEAR 2010 (more…)

This review, originally appearing in a slightly different version in Mormon Historical Studies 10:1, is reprinted here with the kind permission of Alex Baugh and Jacob Olmstead, editor and book reviews editor, respectively.

It is a mark of the fascination that Joseph Smith inspires in students of religion and religious history (the present author not excepted) to the present day that, despite the plentitude of biographies, specialized studies, movies, hymns, visual art and all the rest that his life has evoked even only in the past sixty years, this volume is still welcome. (more…)

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First, definitions.

(And already, you know this will be long.)

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Please welcome our new guest blogger.

Brittany has an MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester (U.K.) and BA in Humanities from BYU. She takes special interest in nineteenth-century life writings (diaries, autobiographies, correspondence) and Utah women’s history. Brittany is currently editing the life writings of Ruth May Fox, which will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2010. She works at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City and likes to do fun stuff–especially if it involves the outdoors, travel, literature, and being with friends and fam. And Red Robin hamburgers.

This morning, several hundred members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Salt Lake City’s Matheson Courthouse and on the lawn of the Salt Lake City and County Building across the street to express their dismay that District Judge Denise Lindberg was considering ordering the United Effort Plan trust, which contains a great deal of church property, dismantled and sold.

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Mormon History Association
2010 Independence Missouri Conference
Call for Papers
The Home and the Homeland:
Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions

The forty-fifth annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held May 27-30, 2010, at the Kansas City Sports Complex Hotel in Kansas City, MO. It has been twenty-five years since the last MHA conference was held in Missouri. The 2010 theme, “The Home and the Homeland: Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions” recognizes the family as a central social and religious institution within Mormon traditions. (more…)

I have in the past devoted significant wordiage to the subtle intersections between the religiocultural paradoxes of the Wasatch Front, the deeper ideologies of the Mormon mind, and pro basketball. These arguments, one hopes, have made the world such a place that the reasons why Lance Allred’s new book should be immediately embraced by all students of such things are always already self-evident. But in case they are not, I here offer a few lines of explication.
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This summer the JI hopes to host a number of fascinating and informative guest bloggers; our first is Jacob Baker, who blogs normally here and who also eats a mean calzone.

Jacob is a PhD student in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. He has published essays on Mormon theology, philosophy, and history in Dialogue and Element: The Journal for the Society of Mormon Philosophy and Theology and is currently working as editor of a collection of essays by Mormon and non-Mormon scholars on Mormon philosophy and theology (somehow he’ll need to learn write and care about non-Mormon topics if he is ever to get a job). Though ridiculously ignorant of history and historiographical methodology, he feels honored to be a former Bushman fellow (2007) and sit in wonderment and awe at the feet of Matt B., Stan T., and David G. (Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens were pretty good too). Most importantly, he he is married to the former Amanda Nielson and has 3 children.

Over the past week, four contributors to the Juvenile Instructor have toured, given tours, researched in, peered through the windows of, and otherwise participated in the opening of the new LDS Church History Library and Archives. Their experiences, ruminations, and ponderables are below.

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This post inaugurates a new series at the Juvenile Instructor, featuring brief conversations reassessing the significance of major works of Mormon history.
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There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this conference, and every inch of it deserved. Not a cubic zirconium among the presentations, and more than one absolute diamond (Laurie Maffly-Kipp on preparation; Richard Cohen on the Hebrew temple). This was an impressive and a diverse kaleidoscope, and the most interesting thing was the way, one after another, each speaker demonstrated the point Jeanne Halgren Kilde made – that talking about sacred space, at its essence, is talking about the way we experience religion. Space matters because people do things in it.
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I’m teaching a course this semester called “Prophecy in American History.”   We’re examining particularly the interaction between prophetic figures and the society around them.  How did they use religion to critique, affirm, or offer alternatives to the world they lived in?   In what ways does religion shape what it means to be an American, and vice versa?  After an introductory class in which we read Max Weber, Rodney Stark, Anthony Wallace, and Walter Brueggemann on the nature of prophecy, we have turned our attention to a series of American prophets.   We began with Anne Hutchinson; next week we’ll discuss Nat Turner.

The week following, we’ll visit Joseph Smith.

What I’ve reproduced below is the blog entry that I’ll post the night after the Nat Turner course, introducing the students to the readings they will do for Smith.

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Inspired by Edje, I dug this out of the archives.  Originally posted in slightly different form here.  

By 1910, 55 out of every 100 American Protestant missionaries – a group numbering in the tens of thousands whose reach extended from the cities of the United States to Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America – were women.[1] Furthermore, the congregational associations who supported these missionaries were also dominated by women. Though it could be argued this merely reflects the historic gender gap within Christian congregations, such a boring sociological explanation was not how these missionaries explained themselves to themselves, or how their leaders lauded them. (more…)

“You go live in Utah.”

- Point guard Derek Harper to reporters, explaining why he refused to report to the Utah Jazz after being traded to the Salt Lake team

I’ve been alarmed to note that a particularly symbolic cultural recalibration that the Monson administration has wrought has gone largely overlooked.[1]  We used to have a church president who visited the locker rooms of the BYU football team in order to instruct the players not to “muff it.”   Today, however, the team that reaps the undoubtedly vast rewards of prophetic beneficence is the Utah Jazz. [2]

Now, granted, Thomas Monson may be indifferent to the larger circles of meaning rotating around his choice of entertainment, and nothing more than a pro basketball fan.  These are not unusual creatures along the Wasatch Front  However, as will be further explored below, the cultural significance of their presence there is often missed.  So it behooves us to think a bit more deeply about the sport and its particular manifestations in the geographical and cultural landscapes of Mormondom.

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We at the JI are pleased to welcome a new guest blogger, Kate B.    Kate’s an admired presence in the Mormon history world, having published (among other works) an award-winning article in the Utah Historical Quarterly, and has presented at a veritable plethora of MHA conferences.   She holds an MA in history, and was a key cog in the now famous 2003 Claudia Bushman-directed “Mormon Women in the Twentieth Century” summer seminar.  Her interests include women’s history, Mormon history, local history and historic preservation. Also, she graced my own grad school experience with her presence.  Current hobbies include chasing around a two year old and his dog.

We are eager to see what she comes up with.  Welcome, Kate!

Prospects for Scholarship in the Humanities

May 8-9, 2009

BYU Provo and Aspen Grove, UT

A conference sponsored by Mormon Scholars in the Humanities

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So, you’ve hunted down the latest eerie photograph of dead prisoners of war once held in Salt Lake City’s Fort Douglas. You’ve stumbled backwards over the rough ground around Emo’s grave more nights than you can remember, and you’ve shaken your head in patronizing amusement when George fiddles with the lighting in the Capitol Theatre. You’ve even made the trip down to Utah Valley to poke around the old Lehi Hospital, where the elevator does not always work as it should, and the chief resident once murdered his lover, the unlucky head of nursing.

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