Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup (MSWR)

Be sure to follow the comment sections from this week’s posts. The comments offer further discussion into this week’s posts, and engage the topics more fully.

DATES TO REMEMBER

Remember that the Mormon History Association’s Call for Papers due date is October 1st.  If you are looking to join a panel, feel free to comment on the link in the last sentence or post in one of the Mormon History Association sites mentioned on that link.

Jared Farmer is speaking at the Salt Lake City Library on Utah environmental history and culture.

Todd Compton is also speaking this Thursday, at Benchmark Books. He will be speaking on his new Jacob Hamblin biography.

The final plug for lectures in today’s post goes to Kris Wright’s upcoming lecture on September 12. You won’t want to miss her look at Mormon material culture, women, and ritual.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE

Jared T presented at the Historical Conference for the Museum of Mormon History in Provo yesterday. Be sure to stay tuned to his blog for a possible overview or notes on the conference. Also, if you haven’t been to the museum and you’re within a reasonable driving distance to Provo, it is definitely worth your time!

In other news from MHA, if you are a subscriber, you can now access many conference presentations in audio form through the MHA website. The 2013 sessions are close to being available to subscribers.

PODCASTS

NPR’s On Point discusses a new book, Ecstatic Nation, which touches briefly on Mormons and popular sovereignty.

NOTES AND NEWS

FMH’a drive to fund the Tracy McKay scholarship drive is open. Read more about the worthy cause here.

BYU  Religious Education recently hired a mother with young children.

You won’t want to miss Keepapitchinin’s posts on Saim Abd al-Samid, a Turkish convert to Mormonism, who was secretly baptized in 1901 (be sure to catch both posts).

Enjoy the links. Let me know if I missed an article you would have liked to see profiled in the MSWR!

Mormonism’s Possible Political Theologies: Reading the Constitution through a Lens of Continuing Revelation, Part II

In a previous post, I briefly explored the thought of Transcendentalist and abolitionist Theodore Parker to outline the relationship between antebellum biblical and constitutional hermeneutics. His biblical criticism bolstered his belief in the progress of religion and in the presence of an innate religious sense, which allowed him to dismiss as antiquated scriptural passages supporting slavery.[1] He used a similar approach to reject proslavery constitutional clauses as outdated. In contrast to some abolitionists, however, Parker maintained that those texts contained permanent truths that could be separated from transient teachings. Others went further in depicting the Constitution as a moldable and amenable text, including the dissenters in Dred Scott (1857)–Benjamin R. Curtis and John McLean–who followed some of the framers in suggesting that the Constitution had been crafted with the expectation that it would adapt to new contingencies, including the spread of egalitarian sentiment.[2] The realization of historical change and, in turn, historical distance, allowed some antislavery proponents to accept the presence of proslavery passages in the Bible and the Constitution without discarding those documents altogether. Positing their inherent malleability fueled the expectation of formal amendments, in the case of the Constitution, but also demanded informal reinterpretation. And, at least in Parker’s case, these approaches to the Constitution and the Bible overlapped.

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Placing the Short Creek Raid in the Context of the Cold War

Ever since rereading Elaine Tyler May?s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era for a second time during my first year of my PhD coursework, I became curious about how Mormon families, especially in the heart of the Mormon Culture Region, fit within the context of the idealized suburban Cold War family. I questioned how the religion?s history as an ?outsider? religion and group in the nineteenth century and the church?s long (and arguably an ongoing) transition, more or less, into the mainstream United States affected the typical monogamous Mormon family?s position and feelings of belonging and/or outsiderhood in the post-World War II era.  When pondering these questions, it is impossible to ignore the Short Creek Raid of 1953. The July 26th raid occurred during the especially heightened summer of 1953.  Just over a month before the raid,  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the infamous American accused of espionage, specifically passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, were executed.  Additionally, during the same week as the armistice for the Korean War was signed. The Short Creek Raid is not merely an event that matters within Mormon history but is illustrative of larger fears of deviancy that plagued the United States throughout the Cold War era.

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Call for Papers and Social Media Reminder: MHA

There are now only 34 days before proposals for the 2014 Mormon History Association Conference are due. The call for papers is below, with a few sections bolded with particularly important points. In addition to those bolded sections, please use the comments section to find potential panel partners for MHA. You should also follow the Mormon History Association (and The Juvenile Instructor!) on Twitter on Facebook.

Twitter: MHA and Juvenile Instructor

Facebook sites: MHA, MHA Student Page and Juvenile Instructor

Now for the call for papers!

The Immigration of Cosmopolitan Thought

The 49^th annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held in San Antonio, Texas, on June 5-8, 2014 at the Crown Plaza Riverwalk Hotel.  Our theme emphasizes the interplay between Mormonism and broad national and international currents and forces.  San Antonio, a cosmopolitan, historically Catholic borderlands city with a vibrant but contested multicultural history and a relatively small but expanding Mormon presence, is a good place to explore the immigration and impact of cosmopolitan viewpoints and ideas.   We encourage papers that connect all branches of the Restoration to diverse theoretical, intellectual and cultural perspectives, as well as papers that examine the interplay between Mormonism and other religions.  Texas, a state with a reputation for confidant swagger and independent thought, is also a bastion of conservative moral conviction.  We encourage papers that explore how Mormons have negotiated an identity and thrived in vast settings with firmly entrenched worldviews where they have comprised small, sometimes maligned minorities.   As a state that straddles the boundary between the American South and the American West and shares a border with Mexico, Texas is an ideal setting for papers that probe the Mormon past in those regions as well as in Central and South America.  Finally, with the Alamo standing in its heart, San Antonio is a good place for conference papers that consider the interplay between history and memory.  Sharply contested interpretations of what happened at the Alamo in 1836 remind us of the importance of framing key events in Mormon history from a variety of perspectives.

MHA invites proposals for complete panel sessions and other presentations.  The Program Committee will give preference to complete two- or three-paper session proposals.  Individual paper proposals will also be considered, as well as formats like round-table discussions, readers, theaters, and film screenings.  Please send a title and abstract for each paper (300 words maximum) outlining the scope, key arguments or hypotheses and sources of the paper along with a brief 1-2 page CV for each speaker.  Panel proposals should also include a brief abstract outlining the panel’s theme and giving it a title, along with suggestions for a chair and commentator.  Previously published papers will not be considered.  Student presenters who wish to apply for financial assistance are invited to include estimated travel expenses with their proposals.

The deadline for all proposals is October 1, 2013.  Proposals should be sent by email to brian_cannon@byu.edu.  Notification of acceptance or rejection will be made by January 1, 2014.  For additional information on the conference, please consult the MHA website at http://www.mormonhistoryassociation.org/.

Elder George P. Lee and the New Jerusalem: A Reception History of 3 Nephi 21:22-23

?Do you think President Kimball approves of your action?? This question, asked by an unnamed general authority of the soon-to-be excommunicated Elder George P. Lee of the First Quorum of the 70, captured the lingering tensions over the rapid decline of the ?Day of the Lamanite? that had marked Mormon views of Native Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. Lee, the first general authority of Native descent, was himself the product of several of the programs instituted under the direction of Apostle Spencer W. Kimball designed to educate American Indians and aid their acculturation into the dominant society. Even at the time of Lee?s call to the 70 in 1975, the church had begun reallocating resources away from the so-called ?Lamanite programs,? but the full implications of these decisions were not apparent until the mid-1980s. Lee responded to the question posed above by laying out a distinct interpretation of 3 Nephi 21:22-23, an interpretation that he argued Kimball had shared and that the General Authorities in the 1980s had abandoned. The 1980s, known as the decade when Church President Ezra Taft Benson challenged the Saints to increase and improve their devotional usage of the Book of Mormon?a challenge that saw marked results, at least as measured by the significant increase of citations to the work in General Conference talks?was also a decade of debate over the meaning of the book?s intended audience and purpose.[1]

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Breaking Brigham: Or, Methamphetamine and Mormon Tea

The original Heisenberg?

Over at the blog for The Appendix: A new journal of narrative and experimental history, Benjamin Breen has written a fascinating post on historical discoveries of illicit drugs. Capitalizing on the success of Breaking Bad‘s final season (a show centered around the dealings of a cancer-diagnosed high school chemistry teacher-turned-meth cook), Breen notes that while “the invention of Breaking Bad‘s blue meth has become the stuff of television legend” very few people “know the true origin stories of illicit drugs.”

After briefly covering “the first academic paper on cannabis” (penned in 1689 by British scientist Robert Hooke, who noted that ?there is no Cause of Fear, tho’ possibly there may be of Laughter.”), Freud’s 1884 publication extolling the virtues of cocaine, and “Albert Hoffmann?s accidental discovery of acid,” Breen turns his attention to “the strange fact that methamphetamine was actually invented in 1890s Japan.” In 1893, Nagayoshi Nagai successfully synthesized meth by “isolat[ing] the stimulant ephedrine from Ephedra sinica, a plant long used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.”  For those interested in the whole story, I recommend clicking over and reading the entire post—it really is quite fascinating. But one throwaway line caught my attention and will almost certainly interest readers here. Describing ephedrine, Breen notes that it “is a mild stimulant, notable nowadays as an ingredient in shady weight-loss supplements and as one of the few drugs permitted to Mormons.”

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The Beast of Almería and Mormon Lampreys, Mermaids, and Leviathans

Earlier this week an unidentified four-meter-long animal washed up on a beach at Almería, Spain (ht Kristine Haglund; see image below).

In some of the photos it seems that the animal has  horns, though subsequent reports are that the ?horns? are actually displaced bones protruding from the rotting carcass. I can?t think of any particular ?Mormon angle? for this particular beast, but since we?re in the neighborhood? there are a few things to be said, briefly, about figurative language, Mormons, and sea creatures of uncertain taxonomy.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup (August 25, 2013)

‘Nother week, ‘nother roundup. Let’s do this.

Not to be confused with the Army of Helaman.

First up, the LDS Church reached a milestone by surpassing 75,000 missionaries. These two should not be counted among them.

Exciting news in Book of Mormon Studies: the Maxwell Instute has appointed Brian Hauglid as editor, and Joseph Spencer and Mark Wright as associate editors, of the re-named Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (previously named Journal of Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture and Lots of Other Names That Made this a Ridiculous Journal Title Studies). I think they should recruit this guy to write their first lead article.

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Journal Overview: BYU Studies Quarterly 52:2 (Summer 2013)

Not long ago BYU Studies Quarterly rolled out its summer issue, and it?s time for a quick overview of the historical articles there. For those unfamiliar with the journal, BYUSQ has been running under the auspices of BYU since 1959, long enough to claim to be ?the original Mormon Studies journal.? (Until April 2012, the journal ran under the title of BYU Studies.) Currently under the editorship of Jack W. Welch, the journal is interdisciplinary and its purposes run parallel to those of BYU: the journal aims to be ?faithful and scholarly throughout, harmonizing wherever possible the intellectual and the spiritual on subjects of interest to Latter-day Saints and to scholars studying the Latter-day Saint experience.?

The Summer 2013 issue offers several articles that will interest JI?s readers. In the leadoff article, Richard Bennett offers a sequel to his earlier piece ??Line Upon Line, Precept Upon Precept?: Reflections on the 1877 Commencement of the Performance of the Endowments and Sealings for the Dead,? BYU Studies 44, no. 3 (2005): 38-77. In that article, Bennett emphasized the completion of the St. George Temple as a ?watershed moment in the history of the development of modern Mormon temple work.? The article outlined the expansion of certain forms of temple work as the temple was completed, and characterized the period as highly formative for Mormon religious thought and practice.

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Musings on Archival Research, Methods and Workflow

…or how to hack your summer archives trip and come off victorious.

This post grew out of a conversation I had with fellow JI-er Christopher Jones during one of his lengthy jaunts around the Atlantic seaboard during his summer dissertation research. I have the good fortune to be located not too far from the American Antiquarian Society and could offer him room & board during his research trip there, and since I didn?t set foot inside an archives all summer I was living vicariously through everyone else?s treasure-hunting. We got to talking about archival research method: how we historians actually do what we do inside the archives, and reflecting on how we all get very little graduate-level instruction on the nitty-gritty of how to do this, and how it might benefit our JI community to have a broader conversation about it.

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