By Ben PJune 10, 2015
Mormon History Association 51st Annual Conference
Call for Papers
2016 Snowbird, Utah
?Practice?
The 51st annual meeting of the Mormon History Association will take place on June 9-12, 2016*. The conference theme is simple yet evocative: ?Practice.? The work of Mormon history in the past few decades has delved deeply into theological, institutional, and cultural research. And yet the richness of the lived realities of the Mormon experience begs to be uncovered in new ways that cut across these familiar categories. ?Practice,? in this sense, is used broadly in order to capture the dynamic participation of individual adherents within diverse strains of Mormonism throughout the past two centuries. Several decades-worth of scholarship in ?lived religion? provides the tools to capture these fresh perspectives. Mormonism?s distinctive religious morphology and substantial corpus of records creates a promising field for new theoretical understanding. What role does ?practice? play in Mormon religiosity? What is the relationship between hierarchical, correlated authority and grassroots implementation and innovation? How do Mormon practices change, evolve, and adapt over generations and throughout global communities? How are global Mormon religious norms shaped by indigenous culture in Salt Lake City, Kinshasa, or Manila?
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By Edje JeterJune 9, 2015
Below I summarize (700 words) my 2015 MHA paper (3,000 words), “The Origin and Persistence of Mormon Horns.” Note that I’ve blogged about Mormon horns before and almost all the images I used in the presentation have appeared in prior blog posts, so I’ve omitted them here.
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By Mees TielensJune 8, 2015
This is the fifth installment of the first annual JI Summer Book Club. This year we are reading Richard Bushman?s landmark biography of Mormonism?s founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). JI bloggers will be covering small chunks of the book in successive weeks through the summer, with new posts appearing Monday mornings. We invite anyone and everyone interested to read along and to use the comment sections on each post to share your own reflections and questions. There are discussion questions below.
Installments:
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By J StuartJune 6, 2015
Every year at MHA, generous vendors, periodicals, presses, and bookstores donate their products for the Mormon History Association Student Reception. It is a fantastic event that is only possible because of their generosity. We at JI (and the MHA) would like to publicly thank those vendors. Here they are listed in alphabetical order:
Benchmark Books
BYU Studies
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
Greg Kofford Books
MHA Local Arrangements Committee
Mormon Historical Studies
Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
Signature Books
University of Illinois Press
University of Oklahoma Press
University of Utah Press
Thank you very much! If you are interested in donating books for next year’s student reception, please e-mail the Mormon History Association (or Joseph Stuart, the student representative).
By J StuartJune 5, 2015
Please join us in congratulating this year’s winners of the 2015 Mormon History Association Awards (JI bloggers are bolded):
Leonard J. Arrington Award: Néstor Esteban Curbelo Armando
Best Book Award: Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City,:Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
Best First Book Award: David J. Howlett, Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of of Illinois Press, 2014).
Best Biography: Julie Debra Neuffer, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014).
Best Documentary Editing/Bibliography: Terryl L.Givens and Reid L. Neilson, eds. The Columbia Sourcebook of Mormons in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Best Family/Community History: Donna Smart Toland, Finding Rachel & Myra Among Henrie Pioneers (self-published).
Best Personal History/Memoir: Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels (Grand Rapids, MIL Wm. B. Erdmans Press, 2014).
Best International Book: Marjorie Newton, Mormon and Maori (Salt Lake City,:Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
Best Article: Andrea G. Radke-Moss, “I hid [the Prophet] in a corn patch’: Mormon Women as Healers, Concealers, and Protectors in the 1838 Mormon-Missouri War,” Mormon Historical Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 25-40.
Article Awards of Excellence (2): David Walker, “Transporting Mormonism: Railroads and Religious Sensation in the American West,” in Sally Promey, ed. Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 581-603.
Christopher James Blythe, “Would to God, Brethren, I could Tell you Who I Am!’: Nineteenth-Century Mormonisms and the Apotheosis of Joseph Smith,” Nova Religio: The Journal Of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18 no. 2 (2014): 5-27.
Best International Article (2): Casey Paul Griffiths, Scott Esplin, Barbara Morgan, and E. Vance Randall “Colegios Chilenos de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias’: The History of Latter-day Saint Schools in Chile,” Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 1 (2014): 97-134.
Dylan Beatty, “Mamona and the Mau: Latter-day Saints Amidst Resistance in Colonial Samoa,” Pacific Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 48-74.
Best Article on Mormon Women’s History: Rachel Cope, “Composing Radical Lives: Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs” in Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion, ed. Mary McCartin Wearn (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 45-58.
Best Dissertation Award: Max Perry Mueller, “Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880,” Harvard University.
Best Thesis Award: Joseph Stuart, “Holy Races: Race in the Formation of Mormonism and the Nation of Islam,” University of Virginia.
Best Graduate Paper: Charlotte Hansen Terry, University of Utah, “Rhetoric vs. Reality: Mormon Women’s Diaries and Domesticity in the Early Twentieth Century.”
Congratulations to all the winners!
By J StuartJune 3, 2015
If you can believe it, we are only a few days away from #MHA50! Several JI permabloggers are presenting at the conference and more of us will be attending. A smattering of abstracts from several of our authors can be found below.
Here’s the format: Name: Paper Title (top) Session Title (Bottom). Let me know if this is confusing.
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By Ben PJune 2, 2015
Anniversary conferences are a wonderful time to have retrospective panels that aim to chart the field’s development and future. Therefore, for MHA’s 50th anniversary, I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a panel that looks back on Mormon history’s most successful (in terms of academic awards) and most divisive (in terms of praise/rejection) book in the last few decades: John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (Cambridge UP, 1994). A recipient of both Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s Best Book Prize, most Mormon historians denounced the book as methodologically flawed and, in some corners, as anti-Mormon. This led to a bifurcated legacy: on the one hand, most religious historians’ only exposure to Mormonism is through the book, given its wide academic popularity, while most Mormon historians have tended to dismiss it and pretend it never happened.
Two decades later, it is time for a fresh look of both the book and its reception. What does Refiner’s Fire tell us about Mormonism’s place in the academy in the 1990s? What does its reception tell us about New Mormon History’s relationship to the broader historical community? How have the two fields developed in the past twenty years?
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By J StuartJune 1, 2015
This is the fourth installment of the first annual JI Summer Book Club. This year we are reading Richard Bushman’s landmark biography of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). JI bloggers will be covering small chunks of the book in successive weeks through the summer, with new posts appearing Monday mornings. We invite anyone and everyone interested to read along and to use the comment sections on each post to share your own reflections and questions. There are discussion questions below.
Installments:
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 7, “The Kirtland Visionaries: January-June 1831”
Chapter 8, “Zion: July-December 1831” and Chapter 9, “The Burden of Zion: 1832”
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