Hot off the (E-)Press: Latest Issue of Journal of Mormon History

This week, the summer 2013 issue of Journal of Mormon History was uploaded to the journal’s USU website. I’m pleased to say that it is a very solid issue with several provocative articles from up-and-coming scholars. You can see the full table of contents at the site, and everything is worth reading, but allow me to highlight four articles I particularly enjoyed (which also happen to be the first four in the issue):

1. Lee Wiles, “Monogamy Underground: The Burial of Mormon Plural Marriage in the Graves of Joseph and Emma Smith.” This fun, important, and smart articles examines the narratives Mormons told of their founding prophet’s marriages, and offers yet another sophisticated take on the changing perceptions within LDS memory. Along with Steve Taysom’s article along the same lines, we can easily see this dynamic tradition of interpreting the past in a way that embodies the present.

2. Christine Elyse Blythe, “William Smith’s Patriarchal Blessings and Contested Authority in the Post-Martyrdom Church.” I’m biased, since I research both the succession as well as patriarchal blessings, but this fills an important niche within both fields. Christine uses the robust body of patriarchal blessings given by William Smith during a short period of 1845 in order to examine the mercurial figure’s relationship to and position within a church in transition.

Continue Reading

“The World Needs More Books Like…”: Jon Butler Reviews Spencer Fluhman

We’re taking a break from our politics theme to highlight a recent review of Spencer Fluhman’s Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2012) by Jon Butler. Fluhman, who teaches history at BYU, is, as many of our readers know, a mentor to most JIers, and a leading voice in the new generation of Mormon scholarship; he is also the new editor of Mormon Studies Review, which releases its first issue in December. Butler, recently retired at Yale, is considered one of the deans of American religious history, and whose books have worked to shape the field. (I recently attended his retirement conference and wrote a recap at The Junto.)

The review is found at the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and starts with gushing praise: “The world needs more books like Fluhman’s deft account of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon literature and the fascinating American dialogues about religion that anti-Mormonism produced. Interdisciplinarity and historicity thrive simultaneously in A Peculiar People, and Fluhman’s marvelously succinct book as much elevates him as a historian of synoptic breadth as it uplifts his subject.” Butler also calls it “the quintessential history book.” High praise, indeed.

Continue Reading

The Political Culture of Mormon History

[This is the first post in our “Mormonism & Politics” series for the month of July; it also repeats and expands articles from a roundtable on “The New New Political History,” hosted at The Junto in January.]

This political sketch of Joseph Smith leading a Nauvoo Legion filled with women embodies the intersecting categories of gender, power, and politics of political culture.

Methodological and historiographical trends tend to lag behind in Mormon scholarship, but many new theories typically do end up taking root and making an impact. The New Social History move of the 1970s became nearly synonymous with New Mormon History, post-structuralism influenced discussions of Mormon founding narratives, and phenemonological approaches have recently taken hold of projects that attempt to capture the lived experience of Latter-day Saints. These methods have all enriched the scholarship on the pages of Journal of Mormon History and enlivened the halls of the Mormon History Association, though incorporation remains stagnant and uneven, primarily due to the mixed nature of the field. The further progression of Mormon scholarship within the broader academy will depend on its ability to better appropriate these and numerous other methodological tools in order to produce a more sophisticated corpus.

Continue Reading

July Theme: Mormonism and Politics

[This post is co-authored by Ben Park and Joey Stuart, the two conveners for this month’s topical series.]

In the 19th Century, Americans feared foreign “reptiles” like the Mormons and Catholics would infiltrate national politics.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the Fourth of July. In certain ways, the celebration embodies many aspects of our historical memory: the focus on the decisions made by white men separated from combat instead of the individuals who had risked their lives in battle for over a year, the sacralization of ideals that remained divorced from reality for many decades, and, most importantly, the emphasis on political language and principles over the practical ramifications and cultural experiences that resulted from those decisions. The document, words, and ideas of the Declaration of Independence are important, of course, but our narrow focus on a simple parchment written as a de-facto justification for actions that had already been taking place for months before, and would continue for years after, on our celebration of the nation?s ?founding? highlights the limited nature of not only our historical memory, but also the way in which we define ?politics. 

Continue Reading

A Photographic Tour of JI at MHA 2013 (Plus Tweets!)

First, this link will take you to a storified post that includes a majority of the tweets from the conference. The format is obviously brief, but it helps capture immidiate reactions and poignant ideas. I have tried to both keep them chronological as well as organize them whenever they get too populated. And as you can see, the tweets slow down rather quickly after the first day.

I’m not offering any cogent thoughts on the conference—on the best papers, the biggest ideas, the common themes—mostly because my brain is still recovering from lots of great discussions and brilliant presentations. (Hopefully we’ll have more reflective posts in due time.) But for now, I can share pictures with brief captions. We sadly don’t have pictures of every JIer—but we came close. And all the great quality pictures come from Andrea RM; the crappy quality pictures come from my phone.

Continue Reading

Guest Post: David Walker, “The Mormon Image and Railroad Guidebooks”

[Another contribution to our Many Mormon Images series. David Walker (PhD, Yale University, 2013) will be joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, this fall, as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His dissertation focuses on intersections of religion, settlement policy, tourism, and technology in 19th-century Utah. His ongoing research projects concern theories of religion, citizenship, and historical progress formed through Gilded Age bureaucracies, land grant disputes, P. T. Barnum?s circuses, and Harry Houdini?s magic shows.]

This is a brief story about the religion of railroad guidebooks. More specifically it is a tale about railroad agents? efforts to re-imagine ? to package, promote, and to prescribe ? ?Mormonism? in the late-19th-century American West. Railroads, often in collaboration with LDS leaders, designed templates of national intelligibility for Utah and its Mormons, even while U.S. marshalls raided Utahn homes, businesses, and churches.

Continue Reading

Anti-Mormonism as the American Religion

[Part of the Many Images of Mormonism series.]

In one of my favorite images, published in 1884, the decaying tree of American democracy features the branch “Mormonism.”

It has become a common refrain to refer to Mormonism as the “American religion.” Leo Tolstoy supposedly said it, Harold Bloom definitely said it, and religious historians often repeat it. It is meant to invoke the fact that Mormonism was born and raised on American soil, embodied many of the cultural elements found in its surrounding culture, and remains a focal point of America’s religious history. (For the most recent look at this idea you can look, ahem, here.) While this is all well and good, a new theme has also cropped up in recent historiography: the importance of anti-Mormonism in American religion.

While there were earlier precedents, it could be argued that Terryl Givens’s Viper on the Hearth (1997, but recently re-issued) started the systematic study of American (negative) perceptions of Mormonism; indeed, it was the first to invoke a sophisticated analysis in using anti-Mormonism as a case-study in the construction of heresy. A decade later, Givens was followed by three books that built on his work and appeared in quick succession: Megan Sanborn Jones’s Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama (2009), Patrick Mason’s The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (2011), and Spencer Fluhman’s Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (2012). Each of these books looked at perceivable the same topic through different prisms—theater, southern violence, and the nebulous concept of “religion”—but each shared a common assumption: that how Americans treated and understood Mormons reveals a significant lesson about the development of America’s religious history.

Continue Reading

Series Introduction: Mormonism’s Many Images

[Based on the success of previous themed months (February as Black History Month, and March as Women’s History Month), as well as the month-long series of posts on John Turner’s Brigham Young biography last October and November, we at the JI have decided to run a thematic series of posts every month. There will, of course, always be posts not related to that month’s theme, but this approach allows a more efficient stream of content and excuse to invite more guest posts. Future months include themes like “International Mormonism,” “Mormonism and Politics,” “Mormonism Post-WWII,” and even “Mormonism and Childhood.” Each month is directed by two JIers and includes most other permabloggers as well as a slew of guests. This month’s theme, led by Cristine Hutchison-Jones and yours truly, focuses on images of Mormonism both at home and abroad.]

Did someone say something about a ?Mormon Moment??

Continue Reading

Videos Available from the Joseph Smith & Antiquity Conference

A couple months ago, BYU and the LDS Church History Department put on a fascinating conference titled, “Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith’s Study of the Ancient World.” Thanks to the wonders of technology, most of the presentations are now available as youtube videos, which you will find below.

While there are many papers that I strongly recommend, those given by Bushman, MacKay, Heal, Wright, Holland, Bowman, and Grey were some of the highlights for me.

(Note: in the first four sessions, the last paper of each session is combined with the panel’s responder.)

Continue Reading

Mormon History Journals Roundup, Spring 2013

Though the weather refuses to acknowledge it, at least here in New England, spring has arrived. Among other things, this typically means new issues from academic journals. And since we are your trusted friends and colleagues here at the JI, and we hate to see you get bogged down and fall behind the ever-proceeding deluge of Mormon historical scholarship, we have a roundup of recent articles that deserve your attention.

Continue Reading