Guest post, Spencer Lincoln Green, Savage Nobles: Childhood in America and LDS Culture

For our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth, we are excited to have a guest post from Spencer Green. Spencer is finishing a PhD in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. He focuses his research in folklore and environmental humanities, but as a past president of the Children’s Folklore Society, he makes frequent forays into LDS children’s folklore as well.

An article I wrote which is coming out in the next issue of the Children?s Folklore Review has made me think more about how Latter-day Saints in America view children and childhood. Nearly half of all speakers in General Conference will mention a child?s exemplary actions. This of course follows many scriptural precedents where members are instructed to ?be as little children.? The conspicuous absence in scriptures or general conference addresses of the crying, willful children present in pews every Sunday is understandable, but interesting. Pre-modern Europeans viewed children as little imps, devils or ?hellions? as my mother was fond of saying. Despite all the facebook updates about how wonderful our children are, the popularity of sites like reasonsmysoniscrying.com attests to some recognition that this is more than a medieval view, so why the reluctance to speak of our little angel?s darker natures?

Continue Reading

From the Archives: The Mormon Problem in the Mind of Freethinkers, circa 1886

At the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association in June, historian Leigh Eric Schmidt delivered a fascinating Tanner Lecture on “Mormons, Freethinkers, and the Limits of Toleration” (a helpful summary of his remarks can be found here). Among other things, I was struck by Schmidt’s discussion of the occasional moments of  agreement between Mormons and Freethinkers in the late 19th century. It was, most often, their mutual distrust and dislike of mainline Christians that afforded them these brief instances of mutual respect and accord.

I recently browsed through several issues of The Truth Seeker, a prominent 19th century newspaper devoted to “freethought and reform,” in search of something entirely unrelated to Mormonism.[1] But as I did, I came across a couple of articles on Mormonism. In the May 15, 1886 edition of the paper, Samuel B. Putnam, the secretary of the American Secular Union, reported on his recent visit to Utah. Among other things, Putnam noted with pleasure that “there are many Liberals at Ogden,” including some former Mormons. “Mr. James B. Stoddard was born in Mormonism,” he reported. “He, however, has a keen and fearless mind, and has broken away from the trammels. He will do much for Freethought by his influence and ability.”

Continue Reading

More web tools for Mormon Studies

Lantern

From the Media History Digital Library comes this amazing collection of “over 800,000 pages of digitized texts from the the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.” The site has a fresh interface and the search filters are helpful. Also, a little trick to limit the default full-text search (since the OCR [optical character recognition] of the texts can be pretty bad) enter ‘0001‘ to disable full-text search and exclusively search metadata.

Here is a typical page of search results:

Continue Reading

Southwestern States Mission: The Naming and Blessing of Children

Since we?re looking at childhood, children, and youth this month, I thought I?d look at the ordinance of ?naming and blessing? children as practiced in Texas in the very early 1900s.

Continue Reading

Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

Welcome to the Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup! Let?s get down to business.

The ever-insightful Jana Reiss recently published an article with Publishers Weekly, where she attempts to quantify the extent of Mormon Studies publishing. In a teaser posted on her blog, she reports that, while many presses struggle just to break even on most academic books, Mormon tomes tend to outpace expectations. An average (non-Mormon) book has to sell more than 1,500 copies just to stay out of the red. John Turner?s award-winning biography of Brigham Young, put out by Harvard University Press, sold an eye-popping 10,000 copies during its first year in print. Oxford University Press told Jana that the Mormon Studies category in its catalog is easily in the top three in terms of sales, with Massacre at Mountain Meadows ranking in the press?s top ten best sellers in the overall Religion category over the last two decades. Jana doesn?t provide a number for copies sold, but knowledgeable observers associated with the JI suggest that it exceeds 65,000. Although Jana doesn?t address it in her blog post, the number of mid-tier presses trying to get into the Mormon Studies market is also increasing (I?ll defer to Ben, the JI?s resident Mormon Studies watcher, to provide a list in the comments section). This week’s announcement of Fairleigh Dickenson University’s new Mormon Studies series demonstrates this.

Continue Reading

Adolescence, Gendered Anxieties, and the Emergence of the YLMIA and YMMIA

As I have been writing (or trying to write!) my dissertation of conceptions of and conversations about Mormon girlhood from the 1860s to the 1930s, I have been doing some thinking about how the development of adolescence as a new age categorization overlapped with Mormon concerns about youth. As part of the monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth , I have offered some, perhaps, scattered historiographical thinking below about the development of the YLMIA and YMMIA in relationship to the emergence of age categorizations in gendered terms.

As many of us know the story: on November 28, 1869, Brigham Young stated the following:

There is a need for the young daughters of Israel to get a living testimony of the truth. Young men obtain this while on missions, but this way is not opened to the girls. More testimonies are obtained on the feet than on the knees. I wish our girls to obtain knowledge of the Gospel for themselves. For this purpose I desire to establish this organization and want my family to lead in the great work.^[1]

The fact that young women did not have the same opportunities to learn about the religion that young men gained through serving missions was not lost on Brigham Young. However, instead of instituting a missionary for young women, to Brigham Young the most suitable solution for him seemed to put his most trusted female church members, his wives, daughters, and their close friends, to the challenging task of forming a new organization, the Retrenchment Association, which would later become the Young Ladies? Mutual Improvement Association.

Continue Reading

New Mormon Studies Book Series: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

(Cross-posted at By Common Consent.)

Did you hear? Mormon studies is so hot right now. This semester witnessed the start of the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair in Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia (held by Kathleen Flake), next month will see the innaugural issue of the newly re-launched Mormon Studies Review (be very, very excited), and several new and exciting books are about to hit the shelves. And all this on top of the other Mormon studies programs that have been launched and the flood of excellent books that have been published in the last few years.

And now, there is a new book series at an unexpected university press.

Continue Reading

Mormon History at the Western History Association

With Andrea R-M

Earlier this month, the Western History Association met in Tucson, Arizona. As always, there was great scholarship, great conversation, and even great Mormon history, with papers by JIers.

Continue Reading

Guest Post, Amy Moore, “The Flapper Rose” and Other Warnings

We are delighted to have  guest post written by Amy Moore  in our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth.  Amy writes ?I graduated in 2011 from BYU with a bachelor?s degree in History Teaching.  Church history has always interested me, partly because I grew up near Kirtland, OH and was inspired by the lives and legacy of the early Saints.?

In the May 1929 issue of the Young Woman?s Journal (YWJ), Ruth May Fox wrote of an experiment.  After hearing that the life of a rose could be extended by applying heat, Fox took a ?half-blown? rose she had received as a gift and held it to her heated stove.  The rose bloomed quickly and its color remained, but to her dismay, the rose lost its freshness and its life.  By forcing the rose to bloom prematurely, Fox destroyed a fundamental element of the flower?s beauty.  As president of the Young Ladies? Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA), the young women?s auxiliary of the LDS Church, Ruth May Fox extended the lesson of her rose to adolescent girls: ?Oh, I thought, how like the girl who has failed to appreciate and preserve her innocent beauty, but, longing to be grown up, has blossomed before her time.?  Fox called her experiment ?The Flapper Rose.?^[i]   

Continue Reading

Guest Post, Lisa Tait, Thinking Generationally

As part of our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth, we are very pleased to have a post from Lisa Tait. She has recently joined the staff at the LDS Church History Library as a Historian and Writer, working on projects to expand the Church history web site. She has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Houston and researches late nineteenth/early twentieth century Mormon history, focusing on periodicals, women writers, and generational dynamics. She also serves on the executive committee of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative. In her spare time (which amounts to about ten minutes every other Saturday), she thinks about how much she would enjoy doing some hiking with her dog.