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]”

Job Ads: Building Conservator, Interpretive Specialist, and JSPP Researcher

Job Ads: Writers for history.lds.org

Position: Church History Web Content Editor/Writer

Purposes: The Church History Department seeks a full-time Web Content Editor/Writer who will be responsible for the research, writing, and editing of a wide range of projects for publication on the Church History Department website (http://history.lds.org/). The Church History Department is seeking to expand its Internet presence through the development of new and unique historical content that will serve Church members and interested outsiders, including researchers and academics.

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Call for Contributors–Miracles: An Encyclopedia

ABC-Clio, one of the leading publishers of academic encyclopedias, has announced a new reference volume: Miracles: An Encyclopedia of People, Places and Supernatural Events from Antiquity to the Present. The editor has issued a call for contributors, which makes this a prime opportunity for experts in Mormon history to submit proposals for articles on such subjects at Joseph Smith’s Visions, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, glossalia and healing in early Mormonism, etc.

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2013 MHA Award Winners

JIers clean house.

As announced at this evening’s Awards Banquet in Layton, Utah:

Best Undergraduate Paper

? Joseph R. Stuart, “The Time Has Come: The Context and Post Script of the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto.” Brigham Young University

 Best Graduate Paper

? Benjamin Park, “Early Mormonism and the Paradoxes of Democratic Religiosity in Jacksonian America,” University of Cambridge

Best Thesis Award

? Matthew Lund, ?The Vox Populi is the Vox Dei: American Localism and the Mormon Expulsion from Jackson County, Missouri,? Utah State University

Best Dissertation Award

? Richard D. Ouellette, ?The Mormon Temple Lot Case: Space, Memory, and Identity in a Divided New Religion,? University of Texas at Austin

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Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture,

For those of you not familiar with it, the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, headquartered at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), is a leading “research and public outreach institute that supports the ongoing scholarly discussion of the nature, terms, and dynamics of religion in America.” Among others things, they sponsor and host academic conferences, publish the bianual Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and host a seminar for Young Scholars in American Religion (whose roster of mentors and seminarians reads like a who’s who of the best and brightest in the field).  

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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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The Digital Public Library of America has launched!

The Digital Public Library of America, a project that has been in development for a few years, is now live on the Internet. The DPLA follows in the footsteps of Europeana, a similar initiative in the EU that brings together diverse collections throughout the European Union’s libraries, archives, and museums. One way of thinking about the DPLA is to see it as a super-catalog of materials spread across the contiguous United States in thousands of local, state, and federal institutions. The current “beta” version of the site already has 2+ million records aggregated from “hubs” such as the Digital Library of Georgia, Kentucky Digital Library, Minnesota Digital Library, ArtStor, Biodiversity Heritage Library, National Archives and Records Administration, New York Public Library, University of Virginia,  Mountain West Digital Library, etc. Additional partners are being announced almost daily. So pump yourself up and get searching!

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An Evening with the Editors and Authors of Women of Faith, Volume 2

The Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team (here) is pleased to announce an Evening with the Editors and Authors of Women of Faith in the Latter Days, Volume 2, on Tuesday, April 9, 2013, at 7:00 p.m., at the 10th Ward Building in Salt Lake City.

Please join us for a thoughtful discussion of Mormon women’s biography, featuring editors Brittany Chapman and Rick Turley, a few featured authors of the biographies (to be announced), a brief program, refreshments, and opportunities to meet, mingle, and purchase books.   For an excellent review of Women of Faith, Volume 2, see Tona’s post here, and for a discussion of the complications of using biography in Mormon women’s history, you may reread Janiece’s excellent post here.

Also, look for biographies in Volume 2 by J.I.’s own Jenny R. and Andrea R-M.   Come and celebrate this excellent series!

Hope to see you there.

The New Mormon Studies Review

Great news today from the Maxwell Institute. For their announcement, hosted on their new blog, see here.

The emerging (sub)field of Mormon studies has proven to be as multivocal as it is diverse. Though history has long been the dominant discipline of Mormon academic research, other fields are finally staking their claim. Interdisciplinary journals like Dialogue and BYU Studies Quarterly are featuring provocative works in theology, literature, musicology, and political science. There have been an explosion of journals covering the field, to the point that one could say there is more quantity than quality. We have seen an increase in quality books, with many more to come. There are conferences throughout the nation (and lately, to a very limited extent, world), and academic chairs and programs cropping up at prestigious universities. Even the New York Times is catching on to the game. Sometimes it can be easy to get lost in such a worldwind. 

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