Lysol and Mother’s Day

Mormon missionary history typically focuses on the histories of the white men who traveled from the gold fields of California to proselytize among the native Hawaiians or among Australians living in Perth and Melbourne.  Although these histories can be engaging forays into Mormonism, my research recently has focused on the men and women who lived in Laie in an attempt to avoid American anti-polygamy legislation.  Doing so has been a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of the early Mormon community.  I have learned, for example, that Susa Young Gates loved a bit of salacious gossip, even though she often repented of it afterward.  The women of the mission responded bitterly towards her, writing in one case that that woman could ?talk? in spite of being told that no one on the mission cared to listen to that ?rubbish.?

What has been most fascinating, however, has been reading about their various pregnancies and labors. 

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Conference on Mormonism in Latin America and the Borderlands + 100th Anniversary Commemoration of Mormon Exodus in El Paso, July 28, 2012

There are three exciting events happening in El Paso, Texas this summer, July 28, 2012. A little over a year ago I found myself thinking about the impending 100th anniversary of what has become known as the Mormon Exodus in 1912 which saw several thousand Euro-American Mormons from northern Mexico colonies leave their homes and take a train first to El Paso (where some remained) and then on to other areas of the country in response to their concern for their personal safety during the Mexican Revolution. Though some returned shortly after (and two of these colonies remain to the present), for the families of many such as George Romney (Mitt’s father), this migration represented the end of a decades-old sojourn in Mexico. 

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Arizona, Race, and Mormon Political Identity

In recent years, historians have looked beyond Utah’s borders to Arizona as a fruitful place to explore the dynamics of race, gender, and class among Mormons in the American West. Two works that have appeared of late include Mormons as prominent actors in Arizona’s history, Daniel J. Herman’s Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (2010) and Katherine Benton-Cohen’s Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (2011). Herman examines the Rim County War of the 1880s, which violently drew together Mormons, cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, mixed-blood ranchers, and eastern corporations. Many Mormons, with their “code of conscience,” stood opposed to Southern whites’ “culture of honor” (although Herman is careful to note that these categories were always porous). Benton-Cohen analyzes interracial interactions in Cochise County between Mormons, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Apaches, Chinese merchants, white Midwestern transplants, white female reformers, Serbian miners, and New York mine managers. She asks how racial categories developed along with national identities in the borderlands. In both works, the authors use Mormons to complicate facile notions of ?whiteness.?[1]

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Invitation: Ladies? Tea and Book Discussion Group at Mormon History Association

Today, I am going to be attending the Community of Scholars program, sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan.  Each year, the institute accepts a dozen or so students from across the university into a seminar to discuss the ways in which sexuality, gender, and race intersect in their work.  My friends and I sometimes refer to it as feminist boot camp.  The competition for acceptance into the seminar can be intense, especially for those students whose work is in fields that typically privilege gender as a category of analysis. A few months ago, Brittany Chapman and I were bemoaning the absence of a similar space for people interested in gender to discuss their work in Mormon Studies.  Although female historians like Claudia Bushman, Jill Mulvay Derr, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher began the process of unearthing a woman?s Mormon history decades ago, relatively little has been published in the field.  Knowledge about the everyday lives of Mormon women ? the rituals surrounding childbirth, the difficulty in securing food and shelter during their husbands? absences as missionaries, the development of bonds between sister wives and children, the inspection of homes through Retrenchment Societies, and the ways in which they maintained contact with their families in the East, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the Pacific ? remains fragmentary at best. 

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A Semester of ?Gendering Mormonism? by Patrick Mason

(The following is cross-posted, with permission, from the stupendous blog Feminism and Religion. If you haven’t been reading their fascinating and sophisticated material, repent and bookmark their site today.)

Readers of FAR have been treated to a number of posts over the past few months from members of the ?Gendering Mormonism? class I taught this semester at Claremont Graduate University.  I was fairly apprehensive in offering the course.  For one, I?m not a scholar of gender, gender studies, feminist theory, feminist theology, queer studies, queer theology, or anything related?I?m a historian of American religion, and most of my training to that effect was about the white guys in American religion (most of whom, you?ll be shocked to learn, weren?t exactly feminists).  I have also spent some time in international peace studies, where I got a crash course in issues of gender justice.  But I entered this course as a relative novice.  This is one of the fun things about being a member of a graduate faculty?as a professor I don?t have to pretend to be the fount of all wisdom all the time, and I learn a lot from students who are often more expert in a particular field than I am.

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Responses: Joseph Smith’s Holy Ghost and the Messiness of Historical Theology

[The most recent installment of our “Responses” series, in which someone responds to a recent article of interest in Mormon studies.]

As someone interested in the historical development of LDS thought, especially during the first few decades, I was excited to see Lynne Hilton Wilson?s fascinating ?A New Pneumatology: Comparing Joseph Smith?s Doctrine of the Spirit with His Contemporaries and the Bible? (BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 1 [2012]: 119-152). Historical theology and intellectual history can be a tricky field, particularly when contextualizing someone?s ideas with the surrounding culture, though it can be highly rewarding when done right. However, while there was much to enjoy in the article, there were some aspects that made me pause. Besides disagreements with how Wilson presents Joseph Smith?s Protestant culture in general, often in attempt to make Mormon ideas more distinct from antebellum America, as well as disagreements with how she interprets Smith?s theology in particular, often in attempt to make his 1830 beliefs more consistant with those in 1844, there were a few methodological points that I think deserve examination.

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Southwestern States Mission: Evil Spirits

How did Mormon missionaries around 1900 understand and act against  Satan and his incorporeal minions? The diaries point mostly to literal belief in sentient, personal beings that actively worked against the Elders by influencing understandings and feelings. [1] There are a few acknowledgments of the possibility of possession, but no instances of it. In three cases the Elders report the direct detection of evil spirits (rather than deducing influence from the unreceptiveness of the people) but there are no mentions of exorcism: these Elders resisted Satan by living gospel principles and persuading others to do the same.

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“Now That the North Pole Has Been Discovered, Lo, There Is No People There.?

We’re pleased to present a guest post by Christopher Smith, who is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University in Religions in North America. He has never been to the North Pole, and thus can neither confirm nor deny that there are no Israelites there.

According to an 1831 revelation, when Christ returns to the earth the continents will join together and the ?great deep . . . shall be driven back into the north countries.? Then, the ten lost tribes of Israel who reside in the ?north countries? will ?smite the rocks? like Moses, ?and the ice shall flow down at their presence,? and a ?highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep,? and they shall march to Zion in glory. [1] A milder version of the same idea was communicated in a vision in 1836, in which ?Moses appeared before us, and committed unto us the keys of the gathering of Israel from the four parts of the Earth, and the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the North.? [2] These prophecies enlarged upon Jeremiah 31:8, which referred to a remnant of Israel being gathered from the north.

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Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Unit 3: Church History After Joseph Smith

I know that too often church history after Joseph Smith gets shortchanged. I think there are a few reasons for this. Mostly, it?s just that Joseph is such a powerful figure it?s hard to look at anything else. Another reason, at least in the church, is that we focus on church history through and by the D&C, and the D&C gets really sparse after Joseph?s death. But I found myself falling into the same trap as I organized my class. Unit 1 was about Smith, and then we did an entire unit on ?everything else.? My reasons for doing so are basically academic-and are based on Max Weber?s idea of institutionalizing charisma. Even the devout Latter-day Saint must admit that, compared with Joseph Smith, his successors to the prophetic office were not as dynamic as he.

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A September to Remember: Two Exciting Forthcoming Books on Anti-Mormonism and Brigham Young

If you haven’t noticed, there have been a plethora of fantastic books on Mormon history in the past few years. This year is no exception, and we have two fabulous and long-awaited books coming out this September, both written by friends of JI.

The first is Spencer Fluhman’s A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press). Fluhman, formerly in BYU’s Religion Department but has since made the move to the history faculty, served as a personal mentor for each of the five founding members of JI, and I think several of us credit him for our interest in academic Mormon history; I can remember many of us excitedly passing around digital copies of his dissertation on which this book is based. His several articles that have led to the book are all fascinating and sophisticated–including one that earned MHA’s best article award–so we can be assured that the book will be tremendous. Here is the book’s synopsis:

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