Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: The Handsome Lake Story

[This is a continuation of sorts of an earlier post on Native Americans and early Mormonism.–David G.]

Joseph Smith and the Code of Handsome Lake

Lori Taylor, Ph.D.

Lori Taylor has three degrees in American Studies: Ph.D. from the SUNY at Buffalo, M.A. from The George Washington University, and B.A. from Brigham Young University. Through all of those degrees, she chased down the ways people frame and reframe the cultural and historical tidbits from which they make deep meaning. The joy in historiography for Lori is the story that makes THEN interesting NOW.

In 1994, sitting in a Western-themed lodge in Billings, Montana, a friend and colleague told me a story that I spent the next several years hunting down.

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O Give Me Back My Prophet Dear

My parents elected to have me baptized December 23, and I also chose the date of my marriage to be December 23. I like those little numeric connections to Joseph Smith. But the one I like most is the one that was not chosen by my family or me. On June 27 I entered the MTC. It gives me pause every time.

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A Review of Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder, eds., Post Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff.

HBO’s popular Big Love series and David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel The 19th Wife stand as evidence that polygamy remains a perennial topic of interest for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that scholarly presses with heavily-Mormon themed catalogues continue to publish serious work on the subject. Utah State University Press’s excellent Life Writings of Frontier Women series has once again offered a sterling piece of documentary history with the publication of Post Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff, edited by Lu Ann Taylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder.

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The Development of Mormon Patriotism and the Crafting of a New Mormon Narrative During the Progressive Era

While doing some research in the John Mills Whitaker Collection at the University of Utah the other day, I discovered the following two letters, both of which seem to indicate some interesting things about Progressive Era Mormonism and its efforts to redefine itself as a profoundly American Religion.  Whitaker was the third seminary teacher in the Church and commanded a great deal of influence within the seminary system during its first two decades.  At the time that he received these letters, he was the principal of the Granite Seminary.

Adam S. Bennion to John M. Whitaker, 6 September 1921, John Mills Whitaker, Papers 1849-1963, MS 2, box 18, folder 4:

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Book Review: Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America

To get a better understanding of the cultural milieu of early Mormonism, one might need to make an extra trip to Yale?s Beinecke Library. And read French.

Damrosch, Leo. Tocqueville?s Discovery of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. xxi + 227 pp. Illustrations, maps, endnotes, index. Hardback: $27.00; ISBN 978-0-374-27817-5.

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Book Notice: Within These Prison Walls: Lorenzo Snow’s Record Book, 1886-1897

I just saw in the BYU Bookstore a brand new publication from the Religious Studies Center. From their website:

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Women?s History Series, Church History Library

The Church History Library will be holding a Women’s History Lecture Series for the second half of 2010. It begins 8 July with a lecture by Chad Orton, CHL archivist, titled “Those They Left Behind: Experiences of Missionary Wives and Children, Unsung Heroes of the Restoration”. Knowing the caliber of these lecturers and their work, the lectures will in no doubt

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Farewell, Elizabeth

Much to our collective dismay, Elizabeth has decided to step down as a contributor here at Juvenile Instructor. Liz came aboard almost two years ago and for a long time was the lone female blogger here. She’s contributed a number of insightful and provocative posts during her tenure, and more recently launched two of JI’s more successful series—Secularism and Religious Education, exploring the ways different Mormon students at Divinity Schools have grappled with secularism and their individual educational pursuits in Religious Studies and Women in the Academy, profiling several up-and-coming female Latter-day Saint scholars. Perhaps more than all of that, though, Liz is known for incorporating the personal into her academic and historical reflections.

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Review Essay: The Dechristianization Thesis

Jon Butler argued in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People that colonial Americans were not really “Christianized” until late in the eighteenth century. In making his argument, Butler was essentially applying the “dechristianization” thesis to colonial America (he mentions Mormons in a later chapter). To shed light on these arguments, I wanted to summarize the debates over the dechristianization thesis.

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Early Mormon Lamanism, Forgotten Apocalyptic Visions, and the Indian Prophet

The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the ?official? end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South.

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