By April 15, 2008
“I held those remains before they were buried. I saw the bullet holes in the bones. Until that point, it was just what people had told you about the massacre, but when you saw the bodies it became real and undeniable.”
-Robert Paul Wilson, grandson of one of the surviving MMM children, cited in Novak, xiv.
By April 14, 2008
I hope this isn’t a topic that has been discussed here before. I have been thinking lately about what it means to practice academic history. The recent post and comments about the new Emma Smith film, in correlation with my seemingly never-ending journey along the path of professionalization, have caused me to ask myself if the history undertaken by trained historians is any different than the study of the past by others. I hope that I am not constructing a straw man, but it seems that some people in the church have developed a sort of hostility toward those that focus their academic studies on Mormonism. My personal opinion about such hostilities is that they represent a reflection of how non-historians don’t really understand historians and their methods. This misunderstanding causes them to label such historians as threats.
By April 14, 2008
The following is a portion of my research from last summer’s Bushman seminar, in which I examined how Mormons between 1890 and 1940 vacillated between embracing and marginalizing their polygamous past.
With Protestants continuing to be suspicious of a possible attempt by the Latter-day Saints to bring back the practice of plural marriage, Mormons at times narrated their polygamous past leading up to the Manifesto to emphasize their loyalty to the nation. In this context, the potential to marginalize the importance of polygamy was evident. For example, in 1916 Talmage told a news reporter that “when the federal statutes prohibiting its practice were declared constitutional, plural marriage was forbidden by action of the Church, officially assembled in general conference.”[1] By arguing that Mormons immediately discontinued the practice of plural marriage when the anti-polygamy statutes were declared constitutional
By April 12, 2008
All of us have by now been made aware of the new movie about Emma Smith. If you’re not up to speed about it yet, please see here for David G.’s excellent review. This post is concerned, not with the film itself, but with the discussion of polygamy that was included in an article in the 11 April edition of the Deseret News.
By April 10, 2008
The latest in the Redd Center lecture series at BYU was given by Jared Farmer, Professor of History at SUNY-Stony Brook, who we had as a guest blogger here at our very own JI a week ago. Farmer spoke about his latest book, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, recently published by Harvard University Press. As David G. pointed out in his introduction a week ago, the book is a cultural and environmental history of Mt. Timpanogos and Utah Lake–the jewel and the bog, respectively, of Utah County. At least, that’s how they are popularly perceived in the valley today. But things were, at one time, quite different.
By April 10, 2008
A few months ago, while traveling on a rickety bus in Peru from Cusco to Puno, I read Craig Campbell’s Images of the New Jerusalem: Latter Day Saint Faction Interpretation of Independence, Missouri.
By April 8, 2008
With the recent focus on the Texas polygamy raids, it seems only appropriate to share this lecture by B. Carmon Hardy which he gave at Benchmark Books April 20, 2007 on the occasion of the release of his Doing The Works of Abraham, the latest volume in the Kingdom In The West series. I was in attendance at this lecture. Unfortunately, Hardy lost his voice and was hard to make out at times. Again, thanks to Brent Brizzi for taking the time to provide these notes.
By April 7, 2008
Two weeks ago, just after the completion of the Easter holiday, Elder Philip Gill, a Presiding Elder in the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ, delivered the new church’s first Easter message to the world on YouTube. For those not familiar with this organization, it was established in England in 2006, and recognizes Matthew Gill as a prophet and Joseph Smith’s rightful successor.
By April 3, 2008
At least that’s the message that early twentieth-century Mormon author Nephi Anderson was trying to send in his short story “The Inevitable,” published in the Improvement Era in 1907. I think it is significant that Anderson wrote this story after the death of his first wife, Asenath Tillotson in 1904, and just before his second marriage to Maud Rebecca Symons in 1908. Questions of his marital status with his first wife and a potential second wife in the hereafter were likely on his mind.
Given the recent discussions around the ‘nacle concerning celestial polygamy, I thought I’d post this here so we can get some feel for the emergence of this idea in Mormon thought in the post-1890 era. It’s a bit long, but it’s a short story, so it should be a quick read for the curious.
By April 2, 2008
Jared Farmer is the author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Book Cover), a cultural and environmental history of Mount Timpanogos and Utah Lake. The book is an outgrowth of his dissertation at Stanford University, where he studied under the preeminent historian of the American West, Richard White. Jared’s work is a fascinating example of cutting-edge approaches to place, memory, religion, and nature. His first book, Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country, examined the controversial transformation of Glen Canyon of the Colorado River into the reservoir Lake Powell. Jared has agreed to provide us with some tidbits from On Zion’s Mount.
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