Southwestern States Mission: The Release of a Mission President

James G Duffin was released as Mission President of the Central States Mission (formerly the Southwestern States Mission) in 1906 after six-and-a-half years as President. Below are transcripts of the correspondence leading to his release. [1] The stated cause for the release was Duffin?s recurring malaria: his ?constitution and temperament demand[ed] a cool climate.? Health was an imminently plausible cause for release in general and Duffin?s in particular. However, it was 1906, and Duffin was a (secret) polygamist, and a post-1890 polygamist at that. After the ?Second Manifesto? (1904) and its fallout, many leaders who were polygamists were quietly released from their positions. I have zero documentary evidence to contradict the ?medical release,? but I suspect Duffin?s polygamy might have been a silent factor in the decision.

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Call for Contributors–Miracles: An Encyclopedia

ABC-Clio, one of the leading publishers of academic encyclopedias, has announced a new reference volume: Miracles: An Encyclopedia of People, Places and Supernatural Events from Antiquity to the Present. The editor has issued a call for contributors, which makes this a prime opportunity for experts in Mormon history to submit proposals for articles on such subjects at Joseph Smith’s Visions, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, glossalia and healing in early Mormonism, etc.

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Book of Mormon into Darkness

Please join us in welcoming this guest post from Edward Blum, a recognized scholar of race and religion in U.S. history who has contributed to JI previously. Ed is associate professor of history at San Diego State University. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and most recently, co-author (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012). He is the co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (2012), (with Jason R. Young) The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections (2009), and (with W. Scott Poole) Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005). Ed also blogs at Religion in American History and Teaching United States History, and last week attended his very first Mormon History Association conference in Layton, Utah.

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Has darkness ever overwhelmed you? Have you seen cities sink and communities set ablaze? Has a voice saved you? If you know the Book of Mormon, then you are familiar with the tale I tell. After hundreds of pages chronicling the ebbs and flows of civilizations, the narrative reaches a climax. In Palestine, Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. The world felt the reverberations. “Thick darkness” fell upon the land. Nothing could bring light, “neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled with their fine and exceeding dry wood, so that there could not be any light at all.” The sounds of howling and weeping pieced the darkness. Sadness reigned.

It is difficult to overstate the drama and the beauty of the Book of Mormon’s rendering of these days. As one who watched silvery strands cloud the corneas of my infant son and darken his vision onto blindness, as one who takes the Christ story seriously in the depth of my soul, and as one who more and more considers the place of the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, in our religious imaginations, this scripture leaves me in tears. It also leaves me spinning about why the Book of Mormon is vital for American religious historians. It is not simply an artifact. It is also a treasure trove of ideas. To me, it should be required reading for anyone in my guild, and here are a few reasons.

First, the contents and the context feed one another. Most of us teach the context of Mormonism’s emergence. We teach about the second great awakening and the burned-over district, the dramatic tale of young Joseph Smith visited by God the Father, Jesus the Son, and Moroni the angel, and the complex and conflicted translating process. The content dramatizes the context and vice versa. When Joseph Smith translated the tale of the world going dark, he was sitting in darkness. When Smith described the various plates that had different forms of history written upon them, Smith was working from plates that held sacred histories at the same time George Bancroft was writing from paper on paper alternative histories of America. I am not suggesting that the context determined the content, not one bit. Rather, the drama of Smith’s translation seems heightened when we take seriously the text which he translated.

Second, the “wrapping” of the Book of Mormon can be stunningly interesting. There was not one Book of Mormon, but several even from the beginning. As Laurie Maffly-Kipp notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition, slight changes from the 1830 to the 1840 edition were crucial. The 1830 version used the word “white” to refer to the Lamanites. The 1840 version used “pure.” It was the 1830 version that became “the” wording for more than a century. Just as the distinction between “light” and “white” is crucial when we think of how Smith’s first vision is textually rendered versus how it is visually displayed, the difference between “white” and “pure” has been crucial too. Following the 1978 declaration to end the priesthood ban on black men, the 1981 edition inserted “pure.”

There have been other meaningful modifications as well, and not all textual. We know of the new subtitle, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” but there was also the inclusion of imagery. The Book of Mormon I grabbed from a hotel in 2007, which was my first introduction to the book, has eight images after an introduction and the testimonies. Heinrich Hofmann’s “The Lord Jesus Christ” looks slightly down and to our right, perhaps directing with his eyes to turn the page. (interestingly enough, it is a Hofmann painting of Jesus that “frames” Thomas S. Monson’s online biography, an image he claims to have had since the 1950s). On the next page of this Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith looks to the left, as if back at Jesus. Then there is Lehi, Alma, Samuel the Lamanite, and finally John Scott’s “Jesus Christ visits the Americas” and Tom Lovell’s “Moroni buries the Nephite record.” Bulging biceps and earnest prayer mark these paintings. The images frame the text, providing readers a narrative before the narrative. A visual arc precedes the textual arc. What is not there is fascinating too. There is no “first vision” so God the Father is not viewed in human form. Reading these images offer another layer of reading the Book of Mormon.

Finally, the arguments against reading the Book(s) of Mormon seem weak to me. It may be the case, as Terryl Givens has argued, that few Americans read the Book of Mormon in the nineteenth century. But that is true of lots of books and other texts. How many fugitive slave narratives went unread? Emily Dickinson’s poetry was kept private. Moreover, some pretty important Americans did read the book, including Brigham Young.

It is too easy to quote Mark Twain to explain away the book. To be blunt, there is a lot of nineteenth-century writing that felt like “chloroform in print.” Most of my students dislike Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it is too long and too detailed. Moby-Dick is so full of symbol, symbols, and symbolism that it often feels like the whale itself: too massive to comprehend. Readers can just as easily get lost searching for the white whale as they are following the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, and all the other “ites.”

What I love about the Book of Mormon is that Smith and the writers were willing to tarry where Moby-Dick’s “Ishmael” was not. Near the beginning of Melville’s work, the one we can call “Ishmael” stumbles into a “Negro” church. There, he hears a sermon about “the darkness of blackness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing.” Ishmael “backed out.” To him, it was a “trap.”

When we read the Book of Mormon, we willingly enter the “trap.” The darkness descends; the world weeps. But then a voice calls; a body appears; we touch it and listen to his teachings. Then, we are told to sing. Perhaps Mark Twain’s boredom (and ours) tells us a lot more about his (and our) sacred (in)sensitivities and less about Smith or the Book of Mormon.

Reflecting on MHA: Mormonism in Colonial Spaces, with a nod to our Series on International Mormonism

One of the questions that emerged out of this year?s Mormon History Association Conference was how we should think about Mormonism in colonial spaces.  I had the pleasure of commenting on a session with Gina Colvin, Chad Emmett, and Russell Stevenson.  Colvin began the session by exploring what it would mean to write Mormon history in a way that would take seriously the perspectives and lives of indigenous people such as the Maori.  Emmett then detailed the lives of Mormon men and women living in Dutch Indonesia in the early- to mid-twentieth century.  Stevenson rounded out the panel by exploring the meanings of conversion in British colonial India through the lens of the life of Mizra Khan, a wealthy Indian convert who wrote letters to church leaders about the legal and social status of his polygamous wives.

Taken together,

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A Photographic Tour of JI at MHA 2013 (Plus Tweets!)

First, this link will take you to a storified post that includes a majority of the tweets from the conference. The format is obviously brief, but it helps capture immidiate reactions and poignant ideas. I have tried to both keep them chronological as well as organize them whenever they get too populated. And as you can see, the tweets slow down rather quickly after the first day.

I’m not offering any cogent thoughts on the conference—on the best papers, the biggest ideas, the common themes—mostly because my brain is still recovering from lots of great discussions and brilliant presentations. (Hopefully we’ll have more reflective posts in due time.) But for now, I can share pictures with brief captions. We sadly don’t have pictures of every JIer—but we came close. And all the great quality pictures come from Andrea RM; the crappy quality pictures come from my phone.

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Southwestern States Mission: Germans and Other Europeans

The Southwestern States Mission during the time of this study included significant populations of French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking citizens. A variety of other languages were also spoken. For the missionaries in this study (mostly in Texas), German was the most common non-English language encountered, followed by Polish. [1]

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2013 MHA Award Winners

JIers clean house.

As announced at this evening’s Awards Banquet in Layton, Utah:

Best Undergraduate Paper

? Joseph R. Stuart, “The Time Has Come: The Context and Post Script of the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto.” Brigham Young University

 Best Graduate Paper

? Benjamin Park, “Early Mormonism and the Paradoxes of Democratic Religiosity in Jacksonian America,” University of Cambridge

Best Thesis Award

? Matthew Lund, ?The Vox Populi is the Vox Dei: American Localism and the Mormon Expulsion from Jackson County, Missouri,? Utah State University

Best Dissertation Award

? Richard D. Ouellette, ?The Mormon Temple Lot Case: Space, Memory, and Identity in a Divided New Religion,? University of Texas at Austin

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Series Introduction: International Mormonism Month in June at JI

One of my advisor?s favorite questions to ask during our preliminary exams is whether Mormonism should be considered an American religion, given the number of British converts to Mormonism and their emigration to the United States.  Because I work on Mormonism, I wasn?t asked the question and instead had to field questions on the role of violence in the American Revolution and Puritan ideas about the family.  Apparently, most students hem-and-haw in response to the question about the Americanness of Mormonism.  One of my friends asked jokingly if she could use her lifeline and phone a friend ? me.  The question is supposed to force students to think about what it means for something to be an American religion, what the potential effects of early Mormon missionary work may have been on the church?s theology, and how Mormon was perceived outside of the confines of the United States.

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Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture,

For those of you not familiar with it, the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, headquartered at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), is a leading “research and public outreach institute that supports the ongoing scholarly discussion of the nature, terms, and dynamics of religion in America.” Among others things, they sponsor and host academic conferences, publish the bianual Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and host a seminar for Young Scholars in American Religion (whose roster of mentors and seminarians reads like a who’s who of the best and brightest in the field).  

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Reminder: Mormon Women’s History Tea and Discussion Group

This is a just a quick reminder that a group of lovely lady historians and their friends will be meeting at the Marie Callender’s in Layton to discuss Mormon women’s history.  The group met for the first time last year and had a fantastic discussion of the role of material culture in women’s lives and in our historical reconstruction of them.

This year, we will be discussing:

An Article by Eliza R. Snow, which appeared in the Woman’s Exponent (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4tyhi78x48uedd6/ElizaRSnow_AnAddress_WEx_1873-09-15_v2n8p62-63.pdf?v=0mcns)

Neylan MacBaine’s presentation from FAIR (http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2012-fair-conference/2012-to-do-the-business-of-the-church-a-cooperative-paradigm#en16)

Lisa Thomas Clayton?s essay on revelation from Mormon Women Have Their Say, edited by Claudia Bushman ( http://www.amazon.com/Mormon-Women-Have-Their-Say/dp/1589584945/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370193985&sr=8-1&keywords=mormon+women+have+their+say)

It’s okay if you don’t get to all of the articles, but we ask that each participant make a concerted effort to have read at least two of the articles.

For the original JI announcement, see: http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/mormon-womens-history-tea-and-discussion-group-announcement/

We will meet at 4 p.m., Thursday, June 6th.  Note the slight change in time and venue.