Juvenile Instructor

JMH Spotlight: Brian Q. Cannon’s Presidential Address

By David G.May 2, 2018

Brian Q. Cannon, ??To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could?: Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society,? Journal of Mormon History 44, no. 2 (Apr. 2018):1-35.

The most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History has arrived in mailboxes and it is a very strong number. We?ll be highlighting many of the articles over the next few weeks, starting with the Presidential Address of outgoing president, Brian Q. Cannon. His piece, ??To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could?: Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society,? examines the white Mormon entanglement with the 19th-century Indian slave trade, a system that emerged in the violence of Spanish colonization of the Great Basin. As Native nations such as the Utes acquired horses, they began raiding non-equestrian tribes and capturing women and children, who were then sold as slaves in New Mexico and California. After the Mormons? arrival in the Great Basin, they found themselves drawn unwillingly into the trade, leading to the purchase of captive children, and in 1852 the Utah Territorial Legislature legalized the trade as an indenture system of unfree labor, albeit one with extensive requirements for the education and good treatment of the indentures.[1]

Job Ad: Joseph Smith Papers, Full-Time Research Assistant

By David G.March 28, 2018

Thanks to benchmarkbooks.com for the image!

Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers (Church History Department)

PURPOSES

The Church History Department announces an opening for a Research Assistant with the Joseph Smith Papers project. The successful candidate will assist the Joseph Smith Papers in the Publications Division of the Church History Department with historical and textual research for volumes in the Papers? Documents series. This is an exciting and unique opportunity for someone interested in pursuing a career in history. We are looking for a motivated, energetic, and skilled individual to join our team.

This is a full-time position expected to last for the duration of the Joseph Smith Papers Project (set to conclude in 2022).

Job Ad: Joseph Smith Papers, Historian

By David G.March 23, 2018

The proposed line-up, although there will likely be a couple more volumes in the Documents Series.

Historian/Documentary Editor, Joseph Smith Papers

Job Description: The Joseph Smith Papers seeks a full-time historian/documentary editor with the academic training, research, and writing skills to edit Joseph Smith?s papers. This position will last for the duration of the Joseph Smith Papers Project (set to end in 2022). The Joseph Smith Papers is producing a comprehensive edition of Smith?s documents featuring complete and accurate transcripts with both textual and contextual annotation. The scope of the project includes Smith?s correspondence, revelations, journals, historical writings, sermons, legal papers, and other documents. Besides providing the most comprehensive record of early Latter-day Saint history they will also provide insight into the broader religious landscape of the early American republic.

2018 Church History Symposium: Financing Faith

By David G.February 6, 2018

The 2018 Church History Symposium will be held 1-2 March 2018, splitting days between BYU campus and the Conference Center in Salt Lake City. The program committee has assembled a full slate of panels addressing the theme for this year’s conference, “Financing Faith: The Intersection of Business and Religion.”

Call for Papers: 2018 JSP Conference on Translation

By David G.January 24, 2018

From our Friends at the Joseph Smith Papers:

In 2018, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will release volume four of the Revelations and Translations Series, consisting of Book of Abraham manuscripts and related documents. To celebrate the publication of this volume, the project is sponsoring a conference on the topic of translation and Latter-day Saint history on October 26, 2018, at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. We invite proposals for scholarly papers related to Joseph Smith and translation for this conference. Papers could cover subjects such as the concept of translation in the nineteenth century, Latter-day Saint or nineteenth-century understandings of ancient languages, the production of Latter-day Saint scripture or biblical translation/revision. We encourage papers that utilize the Revelations and Translations series of the Joseph Smith Papers to illuminate the ministry and work of Joseph Smith, how Joseph Smith and other Saints understood the gift of translation, and the methods behind specific translation projects.

Guest Post: Introducing Foundational Texts of Mormonism (OUP, 2018)

By David G.December 12, 2017

The following is a guest post from friend-of-the-JI Mark Ashurst-McGee, the Senior Research and Review Historian at the Joseph Smith Papers and co-editor of several volumes in the series. He holds degrees in American History from Arizona State University, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University. Ashurst-McGee has authored award-winning graduate theses on Joseph Smith’s Zion project and the Mormon prophet’s use of seer stones and he is the author of several articles. He is the co-editor, along with Robin Scott Jensen and Sharalyn D. Howcroft, of Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources, forthcoming in February 2018 from Oxford University Press.

Early next year, Oxford University Press will publish a major new book on Joseph Smith and early Mormonism. If you are a scholar or an avid reader of early Mormon history, you will want to own and read this compilation.

JI Summer Book Club: A House Full of Females Chapter 12

By David G.August 20, 2017

This is the twelfth entry in the Third Annual Summer Book Club at Juvenile Instructor. This year we are reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich?s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women?s Rights in Early Mormonism (Knopf, 2017). Check back every Sunday for the week?s installment! Please follow the book club and JI on Facebook.

Chapter 12, ?we now must look after the poor,? examines the intersectionality of the reemergence of the Relief Society in the 1850s. The chapter raises intriguing questions regarding gender, class, race, and settler colonialism in the Great Basin. How did gendered assumptions regarding medicine and health care shape female organization in the early 1850s? How did gendered assumptions shape how Latter-day Saints provided for the poor? How did female initiative interplay with male priesthood authority? How did racial and gendered views of Native peoples shape the formation of at first independent, and then church-sponsored, relief societies? What role did (white) women play in the development of Mormon settler colonialism, and how did clothing function as a marker between ?civilization? and ?savagery?? Ulrich answers all of these questions with her trademark engaging prose, rooting what other scholars might have treated in highly theoretical and abstract terms in the highly personal experiences and writings of Patty Sessions, Amanda Barnes Smith, Eliza R. Snow, as well as missionaries such as Thomas Brown.

Ulrich begins with the Council of Health, a mixed-gender organization of doctors and midwives that began meeting in 1849. Concerned that the presence of male doctors was discouraging many women from attending the meetings, women such as Phoebe Angel and Patty Sessions created the Female Council, which as the name implies was for women only. Using Sessions?s diary, Ulrich explores the ?system of cooperative care? that focused ?on female responsibility for women?s and children?s bodies. Recognizing that poverty or lack of help in the home sometimes made recovery from illness impossible, the Female Council began to act more and more in the spirit of the Nauvoo Relief Society, collecting funds for the poor, and carrying medicines and food to those they knew were in need? (295). Meetings of the Female Council also served as sites for female spiritual expression, with healing blessings and glossolalia. Ulrich profitably combines sympathetic sources with the more critical account by non-Mormon Elizabeth Ferris, a source highlighted by the JI?s J. Stapley a few years ago.

Scholarly Inquiry: Brent Rogers and Unpopular Sovereignty

By David G.July 25, 2017

Brent M. Rogers is the author of Unpopular Sovereignty: The Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). He holds a Ph.D in American History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is currently an associate managing historian for The Joseph Smith Papers and he has co-edited four volumes in the series. Brent agreed to participate in our semi-regular series, Scholarly Inquiry, by answering the following questions.

What led you to write Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory?

This was a fun question to think about. The seed was planted as I read a couple of influential books in undergraduate courses and early in my graduate career that had me thinking about Mormons and Utah in the antebellum era (Sarah Gordon?s The Mormon Question and Will Bagley?s Blood of the Prophets). But, the book project, if I were to pinpoint its true beginning, emerged out of a research seminar I took on war and expansion in nineteenth-century America. Because there seemed to be a lack of western facing history in the course, I decided to examine the role of the western territories in antebellum political discourse. As I dug into the newspaper and congressional sources, substantive discussion about Utah emerged more prominent than I originally anticipated, so I keyed in on that discussion. Secondary sources hadn?t considered the territory west of Kansas as important, but the primary sources said otherwise. After I wrote and presented that research paper, and after subsequent conversations I convinced my dissertation committee that it was worthwhile to pursue a dissertation that placed Utah squarely in the narrative of antebellum political discourse within the context of sovereignty, territory, and power. In the few years following the completion of that dissertation I revised and enhanced that work to produce Unpopular Sovereignty.

Job: Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers

By David G.July 13, 2017

Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers (Church History Department) (Contract Worker)

UNITED STATES | UT-Salt Lake City

ID 186732, Type: Full-Time – Temporary
POSTING INFO

Posting Dates: 06/23/2017 – 07/21/2017

Job Family: Administrative

Department: Church History Department

PURPOSES

Job Ad: Research Assistant in the Church History Department

By David G.June 9, 2017

Research Assistant (Contract Worker) (Church History Department)

UNITED STATES | UT-Salt Lake City

ID 186050, Type: Full-Time – Temporary

POSTING INFO

Posting Dates: 06/08/2017 – 06/22/2017

Job Family: Administrative

Department: Church History Department
PURPOSES

This Research Assistant position will support the work of several web content projects, with oversight from the Manager and other senior writers, as well, assist in some writing projects being overseen and led by the Division?s Director.

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