Max Perry Mueller’s “History Lessons: Race and the LDS Church,” JMH 50th Roundtable

Max Perry Mueller uses a clever title, ?History Lessons,? in his essay on ?Race and the LDS Church? in the fiftieth anniversary edition of the Journal of Mormon History. ?History Lessons? implicate some form of historical appropriations. Institutions use history to formulate lessons, which support certain values and ways of knowing. Mueller traces how the LDS Church alters historical narratives of a ?black Mormon past? through three main time periods to argue ?the LDS Church has worked to tell a story of historical continuity in its relationship with people of African descent? (143).

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Author’s Response: Mueller’s *Race and the Making of the Mormon People*

Below is Max Perry Mueller’s response to JI’s roundtable on his book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People.

Thanks to the JI crew, especially to Jessica Nelson, Ryan T, and J Stuart for their thoughtful comments on my book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People. It?s a great honor and an immense pleasure to interact with readers who have read one?s work so deeply and carefully.

Each of the roundtable?s comments/critiques focuses on one or both of two of the major interventions of my book: the first is to theorize ?whiteness? and ?race? more broadly; the second is to theorize the ?archive.? And my response?or, better put, self-critique?is to remind us (me!) not to think too literally about race or the archive. That is, the book tries (intentionally) to have it both ways: that race and the archive are ?real??as in literal, tangible things and/or experiences?as well as ?metaphors??as in literary signifiers of signified (imagined/constructed) things.

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Review: Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina, 2017)

On the surface, Max Perry Mueller?s book is, like several other recent works, a study of the shifting racialist ideas in nineteenth century Mormonism. Like those books, Mueller argues that early Mormonism is a particularly useful illustration of the fluidity of race, particularly in the early decades of the United States. When, as Mueller argues, white Americans began in the nineteenth century to understand ?race as (secular) biology,? (12) they began arguing that those characteristics they used to classify and label ?races? were organic, functions of one?s biological makeup, and though these characteristics extended from the merely physical (like skin color) to issues of intellect and temperament, most people determined them to be inborn and hence immutable.

The Mormons, Mueller argues, were different, in two ways.

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Welcome, Max

We’re pleased to announce that Max Mueller has agreed to join the permanent cast of the Juvenile Instructor. His name shall soon materialize on the sidebar. Again, with new and improved plaudits and laud, his bio:

Max Perry Mueller is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Harvard University, focusing on nineteenth century Mormonism and African American religious history. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Carleton College. His current research project involves early black Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake. He is excited to find interlocutors on all things Mormon, especially issues of race in the Restored Church (to which, quoting Booker T. Washington following his own 1913 visit to Utah, he has ?not yet converted?).

Guest Blogger: Max Mueller

We’re pleased to welcome a distinguished and honorable new guest blogger to the fold. Put your hands together for Max.

Max Perry Mueller is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Harvard University, focusing on nineteenth century Mormonism and African American religious history. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Carleton College. His current research project involves early black Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake. He is excited to find interlocutors on all things Mormon, especially issues of race in the Restored Church (to which, quoting Booker T. Washington following his own 1913 visit to Utah, he has “not yet converted”).

Under the Banner of Heaven Revisited

Craig L. Foster holds a MA and MLIS from Brigham Young University. He is an accredited genealogist and works as a research consultant at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. He is widely published on subjects related to the history of Mormonism, broadly defined, and along with Marianne Watson is the author of American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith.

            In 2003, Jon Krakauer published his book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Krakauer’s work became an instant sensation. After almost twenty years, it continues to be, in the words of Max Perry Mueller, “the bestselling book on Mormon history in recent memory.”[i] Unfortunately, “best-selling” does not make a book “best.” That’s why in 2004, I published a review of Krakauer’s book titled, “Doing Violence to Journalistic Integrity.”[ii]

            The title of my review was a simple, and perhaps unsuccessful, attempt at being witty. As I stated there, Jon Krakauer is “a gifted writer [whose] text flows seamlessly, creating a literary picture that touches a reader to the very core.” But his book is seriously flawed through a combination of ignorance about the subject and his blatant bias, for which I not only took him to task in the review, but which also inspired the title.

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Review: Essays on American Indian & Mormon History

This is an abbreviated version of a longer review that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Mormon History (thanks to the editors of the journal for permission to post this in advance of the journal’s version). If you missed it, see here for editor Brenden Rensink’s JI guestpost on the book.

P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds. Essays on American Indian & Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xxxiv + 372 pp. Notes, bibliography, contributors, index. Hardback: $45.00. eBook: $40.00.

            P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) and Brenden W. Rensink have compiled eleven substantive essays that explore themes in the history of American Indians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hafen is professor emerita of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, while Rensink is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. Most of the essays in the collection were written in conjunction with a seminar hosted by the Redd Center in 2016. The editors’ introduction states that the collection seeks to identify “ways [that] Indigenous thought”—centered around issues such as Indigenous sovereignty, land and resources, colonialism, and decolonization—“interacts with Mormon histories, Mormon arts, and contemporary Mormon practices” (xii-xiii). The introduction notes that previous scholarship has, with few exceptions, focused primarily on white Latter-day Saint views of Native peoples, whereas the featured essays instead reverse the equation by placing Natives at the center of the telling of Latter-day Saint history.

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Guest Post: Introducing “Essays on American Indian and Mormon History”

Brenden W. Rensink[1]

In 2019, P. Jane Hafen and I published an anthology of essays with the University of Utah Press entitled Essays on American Indian and Mormon History. I am happy to take a few moments here to explain the how this volume came to be and the principles that guided our editorial approach.

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MHA Awards 2020

Congratulations to all the winners!

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JSPP Documents 5 goes to Class

The Joseph Smith Papers Documents, Documents 5: October 1835-January 1838 provides an in-depth series of sources relating to building of the Kirtland Temple, economic collapse related to the Kirtland Anti-Banking Society, the expulsion of Mormons Missouri, and religious dissent. In this post, I’d like to highlight how a teacher might use documents from this volume in a broader American History class.[1]

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