Call for Papers and Social Media Reminder: MHA

There are now only 34 days before proposals for the 2014 Mormon History Association Conference are due. The call for papers is below, with a few sections bolded with particularly important points. In addition to those bolded sections, please use the comments section to find potential panel partners for MHA. You should also follow the Mormon History Association (and The Juvenile Instructor!) on Twitter on Facebook.

Twitter: MHA and Juvenile Instructor

Facebook sites: MHA, MHA Student Page and Juvenile Instructor

Now for the call for papers!

The Immigration of Cosmopolitan Thought

The 49^th annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held in San Antonio, Texas, on June 5-8, 2014 at the Crown Plaza Riverwalk Hotel.  Our theme emphasizes the interplay between Mormonism and broad national and international currents and forces.  San Antonio, a cosmopolitan, historically Catholic borderlands city with a vibrant but contested multicultural history and a relatively small but expanding Mormon presence, is a good place to explore the immigration and impact of cosmopolitan viewpoints and ideas.   We encourage papers that connect all branches of the Restoration to diverse theoretical, intellectual and cultural perspectives, as well as papers that examine the interplay between Mormonism and other religions.  Texas, a state with a reputation for confidant swagger and independent thought, is also a bastion of conservative moral conviction.  We encourage papers that explore how Mormons have negotiated an identity and thrived in vast settings with firmly entrenched worldviews where they have comprised small, sometimes maligned minorities.   As a state that straddles the boundary between the American South and the American West and shares a border with Mexico, Texas is an ideal setting for papers that probe the Mormon past in those regions as well as in Central and South America.  Finally, with the Alamo standing in its heart, San Antonio is a good place for conference papers that consider the interplay between history and memory.  Sharply contested interpretations of what happened at the Alamo in 1836 remind us of the importance of framing key events in Mormon history from a variety of perspectives.

MHA invites proposals for complete panel sessions and other presentations.  The Program Committee will give preference to complete two- or three-paper session proposals.  Individual paper proposals will also be considered, as well as formats like round-table discussions, readers, theaters, and film screenings.  Please send a title and abstract for each paper (300 words maximum) outlining the scope, key arguments or hypotheses and sources of the paper along with a brief 1-2 page CV for each speaker.  Panel proposals should also include a brief abstract outlining the panel’s theme and giving it a title, along with suggestions for a chair and commentator.  Previously published papers will not be considered.  Student presenters who wish to apply for financial assistance are invited to include estimated travel expenses with their proposals.

The deadline for all proposals is October 1, 2013.  Proposals should be sent by email to brian_cannon@byu.edu.  Notification of acceptance or rejection will be made by January 1, 2014.  For additional information on the conference, please consult the MHA website at http://www.mormonhistoryassociation.org/.

Guest Post: Ken Alford on the Mormon Civil War Vets and the GAR

Today’s guest post is from Ken Alford, an Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. After serving almost 30 years on active duty in the United States Army, he retired as a Colonel in 2008. While on active duty, Ken served in numerous personnel, automation, acquisition, and education assignments, including the Pentagon, eight years teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and four years as Professor and Department Chair at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. His most recent book, Civil War Saints, was published in 2012. Ken and his wife, Sherilee, have four children and ten grandchildren.

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Guest Post: Greg Prince on Hans Mattson & Inoculation of Church History

[The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to have Greg Prince guest post on  what has been termed “inoculating” in Mormon History. He received doctorate degrees (DDS, PhD) at UCLA in 1973 and 1975, and spent his career in biomedical research. He has authored two books on Mormonism, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood and David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism.]

In the early 1950s teachers in the Church Educational System met in Provo to write curricula for the Seminaries.  The committee assigned to address church history quickly became divided into two factions.  The “alpha” members of the two factions, both of whom became General Authorities a decade later, argued for opposing philosophies of how to portray our history.  One later observed:

“We were writing a Church history unit, and he didn’t want anybody to know that coffee was part of the overland trek.  I said, “What if the kid finds out five years after Seminary?  What are you going to do?  You’ve got a bigger problem then than if you just tell him the first time.  And you can tell them why, that the Word of Wisdom didn’t really get sanctioned until 1918.  So quit worrying about it.”  “I know, but we’ve got to protect their faith.”

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20th Century Mormon History: August at JI

“Seventy years ago this Church was organized with six members. We commenced, so to speak, as an infant’. We advanced into boyhood, and still we undoubtedly made some mistakes, which did not generally arise from a design to make them, but from a lack of experience. Yet as we advanced the experience of the past materially assisted us to avoid such mistakes as we had made in our boyhood. But now we are pretty well along to manhood; we are seventy years of age, and one would imagine that after a man had lived through his infancy, through his boyhood, and on until he had arrived at the age of seventy years, he would be able, through his long experience, to do a great many things that seemed impossible and in fact were impossible for him to do in his boyhood state. While we congratulate ourselves in this direction, There are many things for us to do yet.[1]”

Spencer W. Kimball, Sam Walton and Christian Leadership

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Guest Post: Bradley Kime on Mormonism in Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic

Today, we are pleased to announce a guest post on our July theme,  Mormons and Politics, from Bradley Kime. Here is a brief bio from Bradley: 

I just graduated from BYU with a BA in History. My Phi Kappa Phi paper, “American Unitarians and the George B. English Controversy” will be published in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment next summer, and my capstone paper, “Exhibiting Theology: James E. Talmage and Mormon Public Relations, 1915-1920,” is under review. I’ll be heading up to Utah State in a few weeks to work with Phil Barlow on an MA in History. 

I just finished reading Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). It’s a brilliant book that touches on JI’s themes for this month and last (politics and the many images of Mormonism). Howard wrote it in response to what many perceive to be the growing trans-Atlantic political implications of American religiosity vis-a-vis European secularity. Howard’s take is that a long-standing elite European discourse on American religion, which he traces through the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, has “left a sizable mark on the formative presuppositions” behind current policy differences and European perceptions of America. (200) In other words, he argues that elite European critiques of American religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries still impact trans-Atlantic political divisions in the twenty-first. And Mormonism seems to have been a particularly consistent target of those critiques. Along with some forays into the secularization and modernity debate, and the retrieval of two sympathetic commentators (Phillip Schaff and Jacques Maritain) from Tocqueville’s shadow, this is primarily a book about negative images of American religion as peddled by its cultured despisers across the pond.

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From the Archives: Joseph H. Dean and Joseph F. Smith on Mexico/Polygamy

On September 24, 1890, Joseph H. Dean returned home from Samoa, where he had been serving as mission president. He returned to Salt Lake City to report on his duties to the First Presidency. After briefly speaking to Wilford Woodruff and George Q. Cannon, Dean sat down with Joseph F. Smith. Dean knew Smith from Smith’s time in the South Pacific.[1] “At his invitation,” Dean wrote in his journal, “I took supper with him, just he and I alone.”During supper, they spoke about:

“nearly every subject, among other things the advisability of my going to Mexico. The Church a ranch or rally there, where a member of the Church in good standing can settle and have all the land he can take care of. He [must][2] till the land, however, but pays a nominal [fee] for the payment of the interest in the money invested. That is so that no outsiders can get footing there and also so that an apostate could not stay there, as the laws of the state give the owners of the land the privilege of “firing” any renter that doesn’t suit them. A many can have as many wives there as he pleases so long as he only acknowledges one as such, that is, there is a tacit understanding between the church and the Mexican government, that we only practice plural marriage but must outwardly appear to have by one wife. Good land, delightful climate, and all together a desirable place to locate. I fell favorably impressed with the idea of going there.”[3]

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MHA Reminder and Selected Abstracts

In a mere 23 days, the Mormon History Association’s meetings will convene in Layton, Utah. As you might imagine, we at JI are very excited to hear from the best and brightest in Mormon History. There are a few events/items worth mentioning:

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Women and the Manifesto: Painting with Broad Strokes

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