Christopher: the construction of Mormon and Cajun bodies as white/non-white is, I think, perhaps the most interesting direction for comparative analysis. I have yet to do a side-by-side comparison of late 19C writings, but in reading them independently, I’ve frequently thought, “this sounds like that negative Cajun/Mormon article I was reading last week.”

As for the persecution: I agree there’s been a shift in the Mormon narration, a la Mauss’s Angel and Beehive. I haven’t noticed alcohol in recent non-Mormon media narration—other than as a neutral to slightly positive description.

David: What is this “Mormon Bib” of which you speak?

Also, on a semi-related note, it is interesting to note that although (as you suggest) Mormons were sometimes lauded for their anti-alcohol stance, many Mormons today use their anti-alcohol stance to set up modern day stories of “persecution.” Just yesterday, the BYU Daily Universe ran a story on religious discrimination and hatred that quoted a student who said he was discriminated against for not drinking while growing up. (I’m completely serious, btw).

The final volume in this early trilogy was The Rise and Fall of Nauuoo, a “companion volume” in “historical sequence” to his book on the Missouri persecutions. In his introduction Roberts discussed at some length the cruel banishment of the French Acadians from their homes in Nova Scotia by British officials during the French and Indian War and then excoriated the victors for their “atrocious crimes” in depriving the French peasants of their homes, a stain “upon the escutcheon” of England. He concluded by comparing this “execration” with the enforced evacuation and destruction of Nauvoo permitted by the “United States, the boasted asylum for the oppressed of all nations.” The only reason for Roberts’s selection of the Acadian story to introduce his volume may have been that Illinois was formerly a French province, but his tactic of attempting to prejudice his readers in advance by the tearful comparison of an Evangeline-type recounting of British cruelty with that of similar brutality on the part of Illinois frontiersmen was a ploy he should have reconsidered. The story, told simply, of the expulsion of the Saints from Nauvoo was dramatic enough in its condemnation of unrelenting persecution.

Are there Mormon/Cajun comparisons already in the literature?

Edje,

B. H. Roberts drew comparisons between the expulsion of the Acadians from Canada and the expulsion of our people from Missiouri and Nauvoo.