By StanJuly 10, 2012
I posted a very brief recap of MHA, focused primarily on David Marshall’s Tanner lecture, over at the Religion in the American West blog. Please feel free to go read it and leave some feedback (there and here). For those who were there, what were some highlights from the conference that I missed in my (very, very brief) recap’ What did you think about Marshall’s Tanner lecture? Agree? Disagree? with his overall thesis or finer points in his presentation? (Did I represent his argument okay?) Please, chime in!
By StanJuly 10, 2012
In keeping with a family tradition that we began last year in St. George, Utah, we turned MHA (the Mormon History Association annual meeting), which was held in Calgary this year, into an excuse for a very big (9,000+-mile) family road trip this year. In preparation for our border-crossing, I read a short story by author and English professor Thomas King titled “Borders” (if you haven’t read it, check it out). It is a story about a Blackfoot woman and her son (told from the perspective of the adolescent son) who get stranded at the U.S.-Canadian border–in Blackfoot Territory–when the mother insists that her nationality is Blackfoot and refuses to specify whether she is from the Canadian or American side: she is from the Blackfoot side. The two are on their way to Salt Lake City to visit the woman’s daughter who had previously moved there, convinced by a friend that it is the greatest place on earth, which the daughter reiterates in her postcards and travel brochures sent home (though, upon their arrival, she admits that she is thinking of returning home). Though never directly or explicitly so, the story is an excellent study in the complex mingling of Canadian-American-Blackfoot-Mormon identities that combine and comingle for several individuals in the area often referred to, among others things, as southern Alberta.
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By AmandaJuly 9, 2012
Newton, Marjorie. Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854?1958. Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2012. Paperback. 343 pages. ISBN: 978-1-58958-1210. $ 29.95.
Note: The term Pakeha refers to the white settler population of New Zealand, while the Maori are the islands’ indigenous peoples.
Tucked in the back of Marjorie Newton?s Tiki and Temple is a Maori glossary. It is possible to read and understand her work without referring to it to discover that a mihi is a greeting or welcoming ceremony or that quarterly conferences were called hui pariha in the Mormon Church in New Zealand. The glossary?s existence, however, is evidence of Newton?s commitment to writing a history of the Mormon Church in New Zealand that recognizes the contributions of indigenous Maori culture to the church and is meticulous in its detail. Newton also carefully reconstructs the lives of early Pakeha converts to the church. As I read Of Tiki and Temple, I was consistently impressed with her careful research and attention-to-detail. Newton has written the most comprehensive history of the Mormon Church in New Zealand and her work should serve as an example on how to write an engaging local history.
Newton begins her book with William Phelps? description of the Maori people in The Evening and the Morning Star in which he rhapsodized
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By Edje JeterJuly 8, 2012
The missionaries addressed several different topics in their preaching, but if there was a pattern or sequence, I have not yet found it. ?Authority? was a relatively frequent subject of preaching, discussion, and disputation. [1]
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By Tod R.July 5, 2012
I have been a student of Mormon history for over a decade now and have also been an active participant of the Web since I was a young man. I rolled with the revolutions of HTML, GIFs, Flash, web standards, and ?HTML5? more recently. These two worlds, Mormon history and the Web, have increasingly been gravitating toward and colliding into each other, inevitably spilling out new galaxies of information [1]. This makes me a chipper boy in the 21st century, an age of expanding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
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By July 2, 2012
We’re thrilled to introduce our latest guest blogger: long-time reader, digital humanist, and (as of last month) Master of Library and Information Science, Tod Robbins. Here’s how Tod introduces himself:
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By Edje JeterJuly 1, 2012
Mormons in the early 1900s engaged Independence Day against a backdrop of political and cultural conflict about Mormon patriotism. [1] By my reading, however, the diaries in this study reveal almost nothing of such contestations. The rural/urban divide played the dominant role in how missionaries observed the Fourth. [2]
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