By Ben PNovember 9, 2010
[Note: The following is a book review forthcoming in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. I appreciate Kristine Haglund and Russell Fox for allowing me to reproduce it here.]
Aird, Polly. Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848-1861. (Norman, Okl.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2009). 320 pp. Illustrations, photos, maps, footnotes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $39.95, ISBN 978-0-87062-369-1.
Just as national histories are always written by the victors, religious narratives are often written by those who remain within the fold. The common tropes of conversion, devotion, dedication through trials, and faithfulness until death dominate Mormon historiography. What are missing are those whose stories diverge from the traditional storylines. In Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848-1861, Polly Aird provides us with an account of someone whose narrative significantly differed from the norm. Peter McAuslan embraced the Mormon faith in his native Scotland, made the arduous trek to Utah to live with the body of Saints, grew disillusioned with the faith he once loved, and then decided to leave the Church, flee Deseret, and establish a new life once more in California. While stories like McAuslan?s are often quickly forgotten, they are crucial to enriching our understanding of the historical period, offering a-traditional views in order to complete our portrait of the past.
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By David G.July 24, 2010
On Pioneer Day in 1941, the Provo branch of the Sons and Daughters of the Utah Pioneers erected a monument to honor the Ute Chief Sowiette for the aid he gave to Mormon settlements in early territorial Utah. The monument, which stands at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Provo, has the following inscription:
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By David G.July 17, 2010
We’ve discussed before the changing place of Brigham Young in scholarly discourses. For academics during much of the twentieth century, Young was far more interesting that Joseph Smith in the panorama of American history. In most of these works, Young was lauded for his organizational prowess and his intrepid leadership on the frontier. He was also seen as the savior of Mormonism, the great leader who picked up the pieces after Joseph Smith’s death. This image of Young fit the needs of American historians who, following Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that the essence of America was found on the frontier. Although academic interest in the frontier had waned by the 1980s, and with it much of the interest in Young as a frontiersman, it was in that decade that Leonard Arrington published his landmark study of the American Moses.
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By David G.June 14, 2010
The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the ?official? end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South.
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By Ben PApril 15, 2010
For those of you who don’t subscribe to American Historical Review, you missed out on a wonderful treat in their first issue of this year. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, pulitzer-prize winning historian and professor at Harvard University, published some of the earliest fruits from her recent work on Mormon history in the nineteenth century (for more background on Ulrich, see here).
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By ChristopherMarch 4, 2010
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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By David G.December 19, 2009
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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By matt b.October 27, 2009
The following emerges from the office of one of our readers, who currently teaches American history at a university in a state that rhymes with ‘Nassachusetts.’
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By Ben PSeptember 8, 2009
This post wraps up the series on Parley Pratt’s influential autobiography. As a review, and also a reference, here are all of the intelligent and insightful contributions:
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By David G.August 17, 2009
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).
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