Guest Post: Ken Alford on the Mormon Civil War Vets and the GAR

Today’s guest post is from Ken Alford, an Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. After serving almost 30 years on active duty in the United States Army, he retired as a Colonel in 2008. While on active duty, Ken served in numerous personnel, automation, acquisition, and education assignments, including the Pentagon, eight years teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and four years as Professor and Department Chair at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. His most recent book, Civil War Saints, was published in 2012. Ken and his wife, Sherilee, have four children and ten grandchildren.

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The Mormon Cancer, 1 of 2: Mountain Meadows Massacre

Over the past few months I have posted on figures of speech involving Mormonism. To the Mormon Octopus, Robot, Hydra, and Upas Tree I now add ?the Mormon cancer.? [1] Like so many of the negative characterizations of Mormonism, we begin our tour of Mormon cancers with John C Bennett, who, in 1842 wrote:

Nothing short of an excision of the cancer of Mormonism will effect a cure of that absorbing delusion, and the strong arm of military power must perform the operation at the edge of the sword, point of the bayonet, and mouth of the cannon. [2]

Bennett uses a fully-developed surgical metaphor: Mormonism is a ?cancer? in the present-day sense of a malignant tumor and the surgical ?operation? to remove it is military action. The ?cure? part of the metaphor is, I think, the most important for interpreting the Mormon reaction to cancer metaphors. As I will suggest below and next week, into the 1900s Mormons—not without cause—understood cancer metaphors as calls for organized violence against them. 

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup (Inaugural Edition)

Welcome to the inaugural installment of our new regular feature, Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup, which will appear each Sunday morning and consist of links to news and interesting items related to the study of Mormon history and culture. JI bloggers will take turn curating the post each week, and although we’re casting the net fairly wide here, the content posted will likely reflect that individual’s own interests. We don’t necessarily expect a lot of discussion to show up in the comments of these posts, though you are more than welcome to comment on any of the linked content and encouraged to post links to any relevant news items we might have missed. Thanks for reading!

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We’ll start with links to summaries of the two Mormon Studies conferences held last weekend in the Beehive State: FAIR (ably summarized by speed-typist Blair Hodges in a two part series at the Maxwell Institute Blog here and here) and Sunstone (reported on in the City Weekly here). If there other worthwhile reports of either, please do post links to them in the comments (especially if they report on the more scholarly papers presented at either).

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Guest Book Review: Dominic Martinez on “Remembering Iosepa”

Dominic Martinez {dominic.martinez AT ucdenver.edu} is currently a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Denver in the School of Education and Human Development with a focus on Leadership for Educational Equity.  He has presented papers titled “The Iosepa Voyage: The Reconstruction of Hawaiian Voyaging within Mormon Context” and “Iosepa, Utah: Reclaiming History Through Connectedness” at national conferences.  The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to share his review of Kester’s book on Iosepa.  

Matthew Kester. Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. vii, 203.  Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover: $44.35; ISBN 978-0-19-984491-3

I had the opportunity to meet J. Matthew Kester in the summer of 2009 when I was in Hawai?i conducting research for my Master?s thesis on Polynesian Mormons.  I was thrilled to meet this exceptional scholar with his laid-back, surfer-dude personality.  Our conversation focused on three main subjects: the history of Brigham Young University Hawai?i; a character from the Book of Mormon named Hagoth who is speculated to have been one of the first ancestors to the Polynesian population; and Iosepa, a community in Utah founded by Mormon Hawaiians.  Knowing his passion for the history of Mormonism and the Hawaiian culture, I was pleased to see that his first book to be published is on Iosepa–a space, according to Dennis Atkin, that has not been researched enough ⁽¹⁾. Other than Dennis Atkin?s Master?s thesis, his chapter, ?Iosepa: A Utah Home for Polynesians? in Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History ⁽²⁾ and Tracy E. Panek?s chapter, ?Life at Iosepa, Utah?s Polynesian Colony? in Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier ⁽³⁾, there has not been as much attention spent on this Mormon colony for Polynesians in the west.

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BYU and the 1984 National Championship

As part of this month’s series on 20th century Mormonism, I’d like to take a brief glance at BYU and the 1984 National Championship. For those unfamiliar with 1980s sports history, BYU won the national championship for the very first time in 1984. As a 2009 article puts it, “I can’t think of a more unlikely national champion … an unranked (preseason) team from a non-power conference.” I refer you to the article for an analysis of games played; today, I’m going to give you a few media perspectives on the win.

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Youth Trek, Public History, and Becoming “Pioneer Children” in the Digital Age

In 2009 our stake organized its first trek for youth conference and put it into the regular rotation for youth conference planning. So 4 years later, we repeated the event this summer with roughly the same itinerary and logistics and presumably will keep it going in future years as well. Now, you may know that I live in New England, not in the Wasatch front region or along anything remotely resembling a traditional handcart route. Treks outside the historical landscape of the handcart companies have become commonplace: unusual enough to generate local news coverage, but frequent enough that a whole subculture has sprung up to support and celebrate it. With some similarities to Civil War reenactment in its emphasis on costuming, role play and historical storytelling, youth trek evokes and romanticizes selected aspects of the Mormon past to cement LDS identity and build youth testimony and unity. It is a unique (and, I?m arguing, actually very recent) form of LDS public history.

I?ve now attended and had a hand in planning both of the treks our stake conducted, so I?m of two minds about the whole experience. A double-consciousness, if you will.

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Guest Post: Greg Prince on Hans Mattson & Inoculation of Church History

[The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to have Greg Prince guest post on  what has been termed “inoculating” in Mormon History. He received doctorate degrees (DDS, PhD) at UCLA in 1973 and 1975, and spent his career in biomedical research. He has authored two books on Mormonism, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood and David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism.]

In the early 1950s teachers in the Church Educational System met in Provo to write curricula for the Seminaries.  The committee assigned to address church history quickly became divided into two factions.  The “alpha” members of the two factions, both of whom became General Authorities a decade later, argued for opposing philosophies of how to portray our history.  One later observed:

“We were writing a Church history unit, and he didn’t want anybody to know that coffee was part of the overland trek.  I said, “What if the kid finds out five years after Seminary?  What are you going to do?  You’ve got a bigger problem then than if you just tell him the first time.  And you can tell them why, that the Word of Wisdom didn’t really get sanctioned until 1918.  So quit worrying about it.”  “I know, but we’ve got to protect their faith.”

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Guest Book Review: Seth Perry, “Mormons and the Bible: A Classic Gets a New Edition”

[Today’s book review comes from JI’s good friend Seth Perry, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where he wrote a dissertation on the Bible in early America, and will be a Visiting Professor of American Religion at Indiana University this fall.]

Since it was Philip Barlow?s Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (1991, 2013) that taught me to read paratexts, it seems fitting to approach Oxford University Press?s new and expanded edition of the book through the materials that frame it.

The back-cover blurbs attached to the new edition include these lines from a 1995 Dialogue review written by Scott Kenney, co-founder of Signature Books:

There can be no question that as a work of Mormon intellectual history this is a seminal ? and eminently readable ? work?.Mormons and the Bible has all the markings of a Mormon classic.

OUP likes the quote ? it also appears on my 1997 paperback. Characteristic of the genre, though, the blurb misses all of the subtlety of what Kenney was actually saying about the book.

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Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple (Edit: New Images, ht Mina)

A few weeks ago, I worshipped in the Manti Utah Temple for the first time. My parents were endowed, married, and sealed there, so it is a special place to me. Amidst my devotions and pondering, I was somewhat taken aback to find paintings of Mesozoic reptiles on the wall of the Creation Room. [1]

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Some fun web reference tools for Mormon Studies

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite web reference tools as of late with a short post. Among the many, here are a few of my go-to tools when researching all things Mormon:

Latter-day Apostles (http://latterdayapostles.org/)

This tool provides a fun way to visually browse the organization of the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1835 (with the formation of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles) to the present. It’s mostly a quick reference point for me with a question like, “Who was in the quorum in 1901?” The developer of the site, Dallin Regehr, doesn’t provide citation of his data, but I’ll assume it’s fairly accurate after checking the datum for a few people against other sources.

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