By July 24, 2010
On Pioneer Day in 1941, the Provo branch of the Sons and Daughters of the Utah Pioneers erected a monument to honor the Ute Chief Sowiette for the aid he gave to Mormon settlements in early territorial Utah. The monument, which stands at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Provo, has the following inscription:
By July 21, 2010
For my nightly and Sunday reading, I’ve recently decided to read academic biographies of Latter-day Saints. I’ve now finished Ron Walker’s Qualities That Count: Heber J. Grant as Businessman, Missionary, and Apostle, Arrington’s Brigham Young: American Moses, Brooks’ John D. Lee: Zealot, Pioneer, Builder, Scapegoat, Scott R. Christensen’s Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftan, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887, and I’m currently working through Allen’s No Toil Nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton. While I’ve enjoyed all of them, I think Allen’s is an extraordinary piece of scholarship, solidly researched and engagingly written. Aside from Bushman and Prince’s bios of JS and DOM, which I assume most JI readers are familiar with, what do y’all think are the “best LDS biographies”? For my purposes, I’m interested in works written by academic historians that are both well researched and written, rather than more devotional examples like George Q. Cannon’s JS bio.
By July 17, 2010
We’ve discussed before the changing place of Brigham Young in scholarly discourses. For academics during much of the twentieth century, Young was far more interesting that Joseph Smith in the panorama of American history. In most of these works, Young was lauded for his organizational prowess and his intrepid leadership on the frontier. He was also seen as the savior of Mormonism, the great leader who picked up the pieces after Joseph Smith’s death. This image of Young fit the needs of American historians who, following Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that the essence of America was found on the frontier. Although academic interest in the frontier had waned by the 1980s, and with it much of the interest in Young as a frontiersman, it was in that decade that Leonard Arrington published his landmark study of the American Moses.
By June 14, 2010
The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the ?official? end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South.
By May 27, 2010
Most historians are familiar with the Turner Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner’s once-dominant argument that American history was made on its margins, on the frontier, and that historians who put slavery and the east coast at the center of the nation’s past were off the mark.
By April 15, 2010
In September of last year, I blogged about recent biblical scholarship that attempts to unlock the riddles presented by Genesis 9, which describes Noah’s curse upon his grandson, Canaan. Based on the work of John Sietze Bersgma and Scott Walker Hahn,
By January 25, 2010
With Stephen J. Fleming
Normally articles take a back seat to monographs in terms of impact, but Lester E. Bush’s 1973 Dialogue article ?Mormonisms’ Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview? stands as a master work of scholarship that not only revolutionized how historians, sociologists, and other academics view the church’s history of race relations, but was also a significant factor leading to OD 2.
By December 19, 2009
Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.
On Zion?s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer?s Ph.D. dissertation
By December 16, 2009
If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)
And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?
For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?
By December 12, 2009
I’ve written previously on ways Mormon historians can transcend the 1890 rupture and begin to conceptualize and integrate the twentieth century into narratives of Mormon history. I suggested that one way to do this is to historicize contemporary issues, such as those surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and show how the past can illuminate the present. Some may protest that this approach is overly-presentist, but I would argue that all history is presentist to one degree or another, and as historians we should be writing histories that are useful and useable.
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