“Prelude to American Imperialism”: Mormon Polygamy, Natural Law, and Whiteness

I put up a link earlier this week on the sideblog to an article by Nate Oman* entitled “Natural Law and the Rhetoric of Empire: Reynolds v. United States, Polygamy, and Imperialism” (available at SSRN here). Because Nate is shopping the article around to law journals and it thus might not catch the attention of historians (attention it definitely deserves), I thought I’d post the abstract here for anyone who missed the sideblog link and/or the discussion on it over at Times & Seasons).

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Book Review: Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.

On Zion?s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer?s Ph.D. dissertation

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Mormonism and the Republican Party

I’ve written previously on ways Mormon historians can transcend the 1890 rupture and begin to conceptualize and integrate the twentieth century into narratives of Mormon history. I suggested that one way to do this is to historicize contemporary issues, such as those surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and show how the past can illuminate the present. Some may protest that this approach is overly-presentist, but I would argue that all history is presentist to one degree or another, and as historians we should be writing histories that are useful and useable.

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The “Canon” of Mormon Documents

Currently, a couple of seasoned Mormon scholars are working on a book collection of Mormon documents for Columbia University Press. This got me thinking: what would you say are “essential” documents in the LDS past?

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Mormons and missions: Daniel Fleming, civilization, and the ?lady missionary?

Inspired by Edje, I dug this out of the archives.  Originally posted in slightly different form here.  

By 1910, 55 out of every 100 American Protestant missionaries – a group numbering in the tens of thousands whose reach extended from the cities of the United States to Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America – were women.[1] Furthermore, the congregational associations who supported these missionaries were also dominated by women. Though it could be argued this merely reflects the historic gender gap within Christian congregations, such a boring sociological explanation was not how these missionaries explained themselves to themselves, or how their leaders lauded them.

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“[T]he only thing that distinguishes Utah from Georgia is that it does not have jim-crow cars”: Wallace Thurman, Mormon Utah, and Blacks in the West

Although it may be surprising to many today, during the nineteenth century anti-Mormons often denied that Latter-day Saints were white. Mormon authors fiercely contested this argument, using republican discourses to portray themselves not only as literal but also ideological descendants of the Revolution. As Patty Limerick has argued, anti-Mormons waived aside these objections and gave the Mormons the same choice given to Native Americans during the 1830s–either renounce your cultural distinctiveness, or move west of the Mississippi River, where no whites live.[1]

Once the Mormons resettled in the Great Basin, they discursively constructed their territory as a place of refuge in contrast to the tyranny of the East. Perhaps due to their insistence on claiming whiteness, their Great Basin refuge had borders that were not only geographically defined but also racially delimited. Although sporadic attempts were made during the first few decades of settlement to live peaceably with Native Americans, by 1850 Mormons in Utah Valley

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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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Document: Harry Emerson Fosdick meets the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

Harry Emerson Fosdick was among the most popular preachers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He’s particularly known for a trilogy of devotional works called “The Three Meanings:” The Meaning of Prayer, the Meaning of Faith, the Meaning of Service. These books have sold millions of copies; there are reports that Gandhi read them in prison; and they’re still in print today.

Despite Fosdick’s high profile,* however, it was the RLDS, not Harold B. Lee or J. Reuben Clark, who stepped up to the plate to represent Mormonism to Fosdick.

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“With All They Have to Perform That Work” – Narrating The Manifesto

The following is a portion of my research from last summer’s Bushman seminar, in which I examined how Mormons between 1890 and 1940 vacillated between embracing and marginalizing their polygamous past.

With Protestants continuing to be suspicious of a possible attempt by the Latter-day Saints to bring back the practice of plural marriage, Mormons at times narrated their polygamous past leading up to the Manifesto to emphasize their loyalty to the nation. In this context, the potential to marginalize the importance of polygamy was evident. For example, in 1916 Talmage told a news reporter that “when the federal statutes prohibiting its practice were declared constitutional, plural marriage was forbidden by action of the Church, officially assembled in general conference.”[1] By arguing that Mormons immediately discontinued the practice of plural marriage when the anti-polygamy statutes were declared constitutional

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Celestial Polygamy is Inevitable

At least that’s the message that early twentieth-century Mormon author Nephi Anderson was trying to send in his short story “The Inevitable,” published in the Improvement Era in 1907. I think it is significant that Anderson wrote this story after the death of his first wife, Asenath Tillotson in 1904, and just before his second marriage to Maud Rebecca Symons in 1908. Questions of his marital status with his first wife and a potential second wife in the hereafter were likely on his mind.

Given the recent discussions around the ‘nacle concerning celestial polygamy, I thought I’d post this here so we can get some feel for the emergence of this idea in Mormon thought in the post-1890 era. It’s a bit long, but it’s a short story, so it should be a quick read for the curious.

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