Perspectives on Parley Pratt’s Autobiography: Persecution, Memory, and Mormon Identity

A year ago, almost to the day, I found myself discussing my masters’ thesis on the role of memory and persecution in shaping Mormon identity during the 1840s and 1850s with Mary Richards, a professor of history at BYU. She mentioned wryly that she enjoyed my thesis a great deal, but that she had noted my heavy reliance on the writings of Parley P. Pratt. She suggested in a joking way that perhaps I should change my title to ?Parley Pratt’s Memory of Persecution.? I laughed along with her, but defended myself by saying that Pratt had written far more about the persecutions than anyone else. Historian Ken Winn agrees with me, arguing in his Exiles in a Land of Liberty that Pratt was the foremost Mormon commentator on the Missouri conflict (147).

Continue Reading

The JI reviews the Church History Library and Archives

Over the past week, four contributors to the Juvenile Instructor have toured, given tours, researched in, peered through the windows of, and otherwise participated in the opening of the new LDS Church History Library and Archives. Their experiences, ruminations, and ponderables are below.

Continue Reading

Liberty to the Downtrodden

Many readers have no doubt heard of Matt Grow’s new book, Liberty to the Downtrodden: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer, and most have probably seen Matt’s posts over at Big Brown. But, it’s not every year that a book written by a Mormon scholar, that treats Mormon history prominently, gets published by Yale University Press. This is a big deal, folks, so there really is no such thing as too much promotion in this case. We expect to have a full review of the work posted at the JI within the next few weeks. But here’s a “tide over” from Joe Cannon’s review of the work in the Mormon Times:

Continue Reading

Teaching Joseph Smith

I’m teaching a course this semester called “Prophecy in American History.”   We’re examining particularly the interaction between prophetic figures and the society around them.  How did they use religion to critique, affirm, or offer alternatives to the world they lived in?   In what ways does religion shape what it means to be an American, and vice versa?  After an introductory class in which we read Max Weber, Rodney Stark, Anthony Wallace, and Walter Brueggemann on the nature of prophecy, we have turned our attention to a series of American prophets.   We began with Anne Hutchinson; next week we’ll discuss Nat Turner.

The week following, we’ll visit Joseph Smith.

What I’ve reproduced below is the blog entry that I’ll post the night after the Nat Turner course, introducing the students to the readings they will do for Smith.

Continue Reading

Parley P. Pratt, Writing, and the History of Reading

Beginning in the 1830s, Parley P. Pratt produced a tremendous amount of literature describing his people’s persecutions. Pratt wrote not only for his fellow religionists, but also as a means to inform other Americans of the Mormon plight and seek redress.[1] Of the hundreds of pages of his prose, among the most significant included his Extra of the Mormon newspaper The Evening and the Morning Star entitled “?Mormons,’ So Called”, which is perhaps the most comprehensive contemporary description of the 1833-1834 Jackson County expulsion.[2] Pratt included this Extra as part of his eighty-four page history of the Missouri persecutions that he published in 1839.[3] In turn, this history later formed the basis of parts of Pratt’s autobiography.[4] Beyond his narrative contributions, Pratt also wrote several poems describing his people’s sufferings that he published in 1840 in The Millennium and Other Poems.[5]

Historian Kenneth Winn has described Pratt as the leading Mormon commentator on

Continue Reading

From the Archives: I was born in Sharon, Vermont

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons. 

Yesterday was Joseph Smith’s birthday.  I wonder sometimes how important it is to us in the 21st century that he was born in Vermont, given that the narratives we use to discuss Joseph usually skip his birthplace altogether and fast forward to New York. In the 1840s, however, as the Saints struggled to win support in their redress efforts against Missouri, casting Joseph as a son of Vermont was a crucial component to the image of the Prophet. The following is Joseph’s appeal to the Green Mountain Boys, taken from HC 6:88-93. The appeal was published initially as an extra in a December 1843 Extra for the Times and Seasons (hat tip, MAM) and in 1844 in the Voice of Truth (BYU apparently just has the 1845 printing; hat tip, smb).

Continue Reading