By July 19, 2013
In March, I wrote about the disrepancy in the guidelines for male and female missionaries. In light of the new guidelines, recently released, I’d like to revisit that post. In a nutshell, I argued that the disrepancy in guidelines demonstrated a difference in thinking about male and female missionaries.
By July 18, 2013
This week, the summer 2013 issue of Journal of Mormon History was uploaded to the journal’s USU website. I’m pleased to say that it is a very solid issue with several provocative articles from up-and-coming scholars. You can see the full table of contents at the site, and everything is worth reading, but allow me to highlight four articles I particularly enjoyed (which also happen to be the first four in the issue):
1. Lee Wiles, “Monogamy Underground: The Burial of Mormon Plural Marriage in the Graves of Joseph and Emma Smith.” This fun, important, and smart articles examines the narratives Mormons told of their founding prophet’s marriages, and offers yet another sophisticated take on the changing perceptions within LDS memory. Along with Steve Taysom’s article along the same lines, we can easily see this dynamic tradition of interpreting the past in a way that embodies the present.
2. Christine Elyse Blythe, “William Smith’s Patriarchal Blessings and Contested Authority in the Post-Martyrdom Church.” I’m biased, since I research both the succession as well as patriarchal blessings, but this fills an important niche within both fields. Christine uses the robust body of patriarchal blessings given by William Smith during a short period of 1845 in order to examine the mercurial figure’s relationship to and position within a church in transition.
By July 17, 2013
Recently, two biographies were published on Elijah Abel/Ables, a black Mormon man who held the priesthood in the nineteenth century with the blessing of Joseph Smith and many of his contemporaries. Rather than attempt a traditional review, I decided to write a conversations post with Russell Stevenson, the author of one of the two biographies. Stevenson is an independent scholar with a master?s degree in history from the University of Kentucky. He recently self-published Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables.
In order to make the post easier to read, I have arranged the questions I asked and Stevenson?s responses into categories.
General Questions
The Spelling of Abel?s Name
Amanda: In your book, you use a spelling of Elijah Abel’s name that many readers will be unfamiliar with. Where does it come from? Why did you decide to go with that spelling?
By July 16, 2013
This is the third in a three-part series of posts about Joseph F. Smith?s experiences during the New York Draft Riots of July 1863. See the first two parts here and here.
Map of Manhattan Island: the cluster of attacks on property in the southwestern portion of the island is close to the Stevens House, where Joseph F. was staying with John W. Young.[1]
In the previous post I argued that Joseph F. Smith seemed to be simply an observer for the first two days of the draft riots. Late in the night on July 14, 1863, however, the riots came dangerously close, momentarily changing the nature of his relationship to them. In this last post of my brief series, I have transcribed Joseph F.?s diary entries for the last few days of the riots and their aftermath. I think they provide an interesting, if brief, look into how the riots affected him.
By July 14, 2013
The octopus metaphor persists to the present but the cultural milieu has changed. [1] For example, last week I wrote about the image at right. My sense is that most 2013 observers would describe it as ?quaint,? maybe even ?cute.? A century earlier it was an ?inky-black demon? with a ?big black body lying flat, disgustingly spread? or ?a horrible octopus? with ?fiendish goggle eyes? and ?treacherous succer-like tenticles reaching out.? [2] In this post I will try to account for the difference—I will summarize something of what late-nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans thought and felt about octopuses. [3] (Spoiler alert: it casts Mormonism as very bad.)
By July 13, 2013
Every four years, the Sunday School curriculum cycle hits D&C/Church History. It’s during this time that we’re reminded of the story of Thomas B. Marsh, first President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who left the church in 1838. According to Apostle George A. Smith, whose 1856 telling of this story became the basis of subsequent renditions, in 1838 Elizabeth Marsh got into a dispute with Lucinda Harris over a pint of milk skimmings [1]. Believing that his wife’s good name was at stake, Marsh defended Elizabeth in a series of investigations held, according to Smith, by the Teachers Quorum, the Bishopric, the High Council, and the First Presidency. Smith indicated that, humiliated by each quorum’s decision against Elizabeth, Marsh left the church and swore in an affidavit that the Saints were “hostile towards the State of Missouri.” In Smith’s account, “That affidavit brought from the government of Missouri an exterminating order, which drove some 15,000 Saints from their homes and habitations, and some thousands perished through suffering the exposure consequent on this state of affairs.”
By July 12, 2013
This is the second in a three-part series of posts about Joseph F. Smith?s experiences during the New York Draft Riots of July 1863. See the first part here.
Image: CHARGE OF THE POLICE ON THE RIOTERS AT THE “TRIBUNE” OFFICE, Harper?s Weekly, August 1, 1863, p. 484 [1]
Joseph F. Smith arrived in New York City on July 6, 1863, after an unremarkable journey from Liverpool (though he did mention with disappointment on July 4th that ?no demonstrations were mad[e] to commemorate the aneversery of American Independence,?[2] ). He had been recently released from his missionary duties in the British Isles Mission, and was fulfilling an assignment to see several groups of Mormon emigrants safely into the U.S. and on their way toward Utah.
By July 11, 2013
Today, we are pleased to announce a guest post on our July theme, Mormons and Politics, from Bradley Kime. Here is a brief bio from Bradley:
I just graduated from BYU with a BA in History. My Phi Kappa Phi paper, “American Unitarians and the George B. English Controversy” will be published in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment next summer, and my capstone paper, “Exhibiting Theology: James E. Talmage and Mormon Public Relations, 1915-1920,” is under review. I’ll be heading up to Utah State in a few weeks to work with Phil Barlow on an MA in History.
I just finished reading Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). It’s a brilliant book that touches on JI’s themes for this month and last (politics and the many images of Mormonism). Howard wrote it in response to what many perceive to be the growing trans-Atlantic political implications of American religiosity vis-a-vis European secularity. Howard’s take is that a long-standing elite European discourse on American religion, which he traces through the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, has “left a sizable mark on the formative presuppositions” behind current policy differences and European perceptions of America. (200) In other words, he argues that elite European critiques of American religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries still impact trans-Atlantic political divisions in the twenty-first. And Mormonism seems to have been a particularly consistent target of those critiques. Along with some forays into the secularization and modernity debate, and the retrieval of two sympathetic commentators (Phillip Schaff and Jacques Maritain) from Tocqueville’s shadow, this is primarily a book about negative images of American religion as peddled by its cultured despisers across the pond.
By July 10, 2013
Image: ?The Riots in New York: The Mob Lynching a Negro in Clarkson-Street? [1]
One of the things that first interested me about Joseph F. Smith was his personality as a diarist. He liked to pen elaborate descriptions of impressive places he visited, such as the ancient Mo?okini heiau (temple) in Hawaii, the famous Mauna Loa volcano, or the Wentworth Castle and Estates near Barnsley, England.[2] He cataloged what he saw as faults in others, ranging from family members, to LDS church enemies, to people he encountered as a missionary.[3] He recorded seemingly insignificant details and used trite or repetitive phrases (some of which have crept into my own journaling vocabulary), in the process illuminating much about his education, priorities, biases, and spirituality.[4] And we can?t leave out the infamous cat massacre that Amanda HK described in a post some time ago.
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