Articles by

Edje Jeter

Adjusting the Chemistry of the Gold Plates

By June 25, 2008


Introduction
Last year, Ronan posted a bit called “Making Adjustments” at By Common Consent (here, with useful comments all the way to the end) that hashed out some of the issues with and hermeneutical strategies for bringing together revealed and scholarly understandings. (See also: Joel’s post from Friday.) The Gold Plates’ putative chemical composition provides an example of revealed-subsequently canonized-language “adjusting.” [1] Joseph Smith-History 1:34, quotes Moroni, an angel, as saying “there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent.” Does “gold” mean “100% pure, elemental gold,” a gold-based alloy, or a color? [2] How much could such plates plausibly weigh?

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Mormons and the Closing of the American Frontier

By June 18, 2008


White, Protestant America’s nineteenth century frontier mythology—as most characteristically emblematized in the western—helped define the American character and justify the violent exploitation of the American West by Anglo-Americans. In the last three decades of the 1800s, many observers, Frederick Jackson Turner among them, worried that the frontier was closing and with it the source of America’s greatness, as they supposed. Since Mormons were part of the West, a change in how people imagined the West influenced how they imagined Mormons.

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The Mormon Justification for the Second Boer War

By June 16, 2008


According to the about section, The Juvenile Instructor seeks to ?situate the study of Mormonism within wider frameworks, including American religious history, western history, gender history, and, on occasion, the history of the Republic of South Africa.? A Google site search for ?South Africa? reveals that RSA posts in JI?s archives are slimmer than a protea?s petal or a springbok?s ankle. Thus, for my first post, I?ll make a small contribution to JI?s South African historiography.

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