A Dream Girl
By December 29, 2009
Over the holiday, I came across this bit of family history. It is a brief essay written by my paternal grandfather detailing the characteristics of his “dream girl.”
By December 29, 2009
Over the holiday, I came across this bit of family history. It is a brief essay written by my paternal grandfather detailing the characteristics of his “dream girl.”
By December 23, 2009
I begin in the time-honored, much-ridiculed Mormon fashion of offering a disclaimer about my qualifications and a story about what happened when I was asked to give this talk.
The disclaimer: one of the great things about being an editor is that I never have to have any original thoughts. There may not be any good new ideas in this talk, in which case, all you have to do is submit some new papers to Dialogue so I can get my plagiarisms up-to-date. I?m also not trained as an historian, and the applicability of what training I have is highly questionable. I will therefore talk very fast so that we can get to the interesting part of the evening where you tell me about why I am wrong and what you are going to do about it.
By December 22, 2009
Over the past year, I have published several posts on JI about my research on how the civil rights movement was discussed in BYU?s student newspaper, the Daily Universe, during the 1950s and 1960s. I have recently begun studying a new aspect of this research that has proved particularly interesting and enlightening ? how civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was talked about in the pages of the Daily Universe in the latter part of the 1960s and then again in the 1980s as the national discussion on establishing a federal holiday in honor of King came to Utah. In the next few posts on JI, I will analyze how students discussed King?s role as a civil rights leader in 1968, 1969, and the 1980s.
By December 21, 2009
[Continued from Part I]
I sincerely appreciate the three respondents participating in this forum. I’m sure all the readers will agree that all three portions are well-written and enlightening.
Although these three are well-known around the bloggernacle, here are brief introductions: Robin Jensen is an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, recently received his second master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his name can be found on the cover of the recent Revelations and Translations vol. 1. Samuel Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Division Associate, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of Utah. Jordan Watkins, theoretically a contributor here at JI, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
By December 21, 2009
While JI has not done one recently, we have from time to time written a “From the Archives” post where we pluck from the historical archives an interesting document as a way to highlight an important theme, offer a new interpretation, or merely start an enlightening discussion. This post is aimed to do all of the above, only perhaps even more so because of the interesting nature of this particular document. It offers so many possibilities for interpretation, in fact, that I have asked three knowledgeable historians to give their take on it from their individual backgrounds and expertise.
By December 19, 2009
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
By December 16, 2009
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?
By December 15, 2009
Building off of Christopher’s recent review of Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, I though I would post a recent review I’ve written on an important historical text that, while not directly addressing Mormonism, offers intriguing questions and approaches that we can apply to Mormon history. The first section is my review of Howe’s fascinating volume, while the second section provides a few paragraphs on how we can relate it to Mormon studies.
By December 13, 2009
I’ve frequently seen complaints that Joseph Smith’s practice of marrying already-married women is “particularly troubling.” That is, that marrying married women is somehow worse than marrying single women. Why is that? Why is men sharing a wife somehow worse than women sharing a husband?
By December 13, 2009
My daughter was diagnosed with Perthes yesterday. It’s a condition where blood doesn’t get to the hip bone and so it doesn’t grow, which causes all kinds of problems. She’s been having a lot of difficulty walking recently but the doctor says its very treatable and for this we are grateful.
Her condition reminded me of a few stories from the past that I’ve read recently.
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