Perspectives on Parley Pratt’s Autobiography: Introduction

Warning: If you have grown sick with the number of Parley Pratt posts coming from me lately, it’s about to get worse; much, much worse.

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Book Review: Lance Allred?s Longshot: the adventures of a deaf fundamentalist Mormon kid and his journey to the NBA (HarperCollins, 2009): A pilgrim?s progress

I have in the past devoted significant wordiage to the subtle intersections between the religiocultural paradoxes of the Wasatch Front, the deeper ideologies of the Mormon mind, and pro basketball. These arguments, one hopes, have made the world such a place that the reasons why Lance Allred’s new book should be immediately embraced by all students of such things are always already self-evident. But in case they are not, I here offer a few lines of explication.

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Revisiting: Mormonism in Transition: a history of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930

This post inaugurates a new series at the Juvenile Instructor, featuring brief conversations reassessing the significance of major works of Mormon history.

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A Pillar of Light, The First Vision, and History for the Masses

As one whose ?to-read? pile lends a large shadow over both my desk and nightstand, devotional history books put out by publishers like Deseret Book or Covenant Press don?t usually make the list. However, a couple weeks I decided to download the audio version of a recent ?popular? devotional/historical work.[1] While this post is formatted like a standard book review, I hope that it will serve as a ?springboard? of sorts to discuss the practice of writing history for the faithful masses.

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Mormonism in The Western Historical Quarterly, Spring 2009

Likely because the 2008 meeting of the Western History Association was held in SLC, the Spring 2009 issue of the Western Historical Quarterly contains two solid articles on Mormons and Mormonism.

Virginia Scharff, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? A New Turner Thesis” (5-22)

Virginia Scharff is a major historian of gender and women in the West at the University of New Mexico. In her presidential address, Scharff asks why historians tend to write small and safe books, when we should be pursuing interesting topics that matter historically. In answer to her question, Scharff presents a new Turner thesis, one that is perhaps less bold than the original, yet equally as relevant for young scholars seeking inspiration in the field. Rather

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Mormonism in Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, Part 2 (Concluded)

In my previous post on Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, I discussed Howe’s treatment of Mormon history from the 1820s through 1838. This post will complete my analysis of Howe by examining his discussion of Nauvoo, the exodus, and early Utah history. Let me just reiterate the point of my earlier post-Howe, unlike other historians who treat Mormonism in synthesis histories, has taken the time to get the details right and to engage contemporary Mormon scholarship. Just as he situated early Mormonism in Chapter 8 (“Pursuing the Millennium”) with other millenarian groups in the Early Republic, Howe in Chapter 18 (“Westward the Star of Empire”) includes Nauvoo and Utah within the wider contexts of Manifest Destiny, California, Oregon, and the Mexican-American War.

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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:

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One of “the great achievements of American literature”: Mormonism in Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, Part 1

During Winter semester 2006 I attended Grant Underwood’s U.S. Religious History course at BYU.[1] Our text for the class was Martin Marty’s Pilgrims in their Own Land, a narrative overview of American religious history. Although Marty is widely recognized as one of the leading historians of American religion, his chapter on Mormons is, to put it kindly, lacking. Many of the students in Underwood’s class complained widely that Marty “got it all wrong,” and “if he’s this wrong on Mormonism, how can we trust the rest of the book?” I remember thinking that these students were missing a crucial point; the greatest value in Marty’s book was not in the details of his presentation, but rather in the placing of Mormonism within the wider tapestry of America’s religious history. I thought, “We can’t expect these major historians to know all the details. What is important is where they place us.” Similarly, a year ago Chris wrote a post on Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, in which Chris argued that the value of Sellers’s work was not in his admittedly-flawed discussion of Mormonism, but rather in the number of pages that Sellers chose to devote to Joseph Smith’s religion.

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Book Notice: Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries

This weekend, during a trip out to California for a wedding (that we were actually late to because we slept in past our first flight), I got the chance to glance through the newly published Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries. Edited by Reid Neilson and Terryl Givens, this volume is a collection of, in my opinion, some of the most thoughtful essays on Mormonism?s founder. In the introduction, the editors noted that, ?The rationale behind this collection is that the day has come when the founder of Mormonism and his prominent role in American history and religious thought cannot be denied? (7). While a few of the articles have been published previously, the majority are printed for the first time.

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Review: Deseret Sunday School Songs, a hymnal

There is no date, though a bit of research reveals that this hymnal was published in 1909.

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