Mormonism’s Unbroken Past: Transcending the 1890 Rupture

1890 is a date that looms large in American history, thanks largely to Frederick Jackson Turner, who famously declared in 1893 that the frontier had “closed” three years earlier, and with it, a distinctive element of American identity had closed as well. Turner’s 1893 essay revolutionized how historians thought about the American past, as he pointed to the process of westward movement as being the core of American distinctiveness. The frontier was where civilization met savagery and the wilderness, where Europeans became Americans, marked by values of individualism and democracy. Turner’s essay also had the curious effect of creating a significant rupture localized at the year 1890, a chasm that left historians with few conceptual tools with which to frame the history of the American West during the 20th century. If American exceptionalism died in 1890, was there anything worth writing about after that date?

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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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The new new Mormon history: a response read at MHA, May 24, 2008

I am here responding to panel 6E of the 2008 Mormon History Association Annual Meeting: “Scientific Mormonism: evolution, monism, and Mormon thought,” featuring the following papers:

?Transmutational Theology: An Unofficial Authoritative View, Mormon Responses to Darwin, 1859-1933,” Jordan Watkins, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

?Marginal Dialogues: B. H. Roberts?s Reading of Science and Philosophy,” Stanley J. Thayne, Brigham Young University

?The Making of a ?Mormon Modernity,?? John Dulin, Whittier, CA

An image: BH Roberts, hunched over a copy of William James?s The Varieties of Religious Experience, pencil in hand, brow furrowed, looking for new ideas, new images, new ways to express and understand exactly what it was that his Mormonism was telling him about the universe and humanity.

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Patty Limerick on Mormonism in the West

One of the seminal texts in Western American history is Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Limerick’s genius can be found in her defining the West’s importance in terms of convergence of peoples, rather than simply the westward movement of white American males. Unlike many

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Latino/a and Mormon

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons, the last of my guest stint there. 

America, as they say, is browning. Latina/os recently surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States, and the Church is experiencing that browning along with the rest of the nation. “According to Church statisticians, the future of the Church does not lie in Europe, Canada, or the United States but rather in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and among the ethnic groups in this country.”[1] Given this fact, it is surprising that so little is known about the history and experiences of those that identify themselves as both Latino/a and Mormon. There is only one thin book on the subject, written by BYU historian Jessie L. Embry that is based on oral histories of BYU students and handful of Latina/o Mormons from Southern California. “In His Own Language”: Mormon Congregations in the United States is a start, but according to Ignacio M. Garcia, Lemuel Hardison Redd Chair of Western History at BYU, we need to know much more about Latino/as Mormons themselves.

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Mormons in the West: Life in the Donut Hole

Scholars typically seek to locate Mormon history within two wide frameworks: that of American religious history and that of the history of the American West. Jan Shipps, in her review of literature on Mormonism in the West, describes the situation as a donut hole. In her essay, “Gentiles, Mormons, and the History of American West,” Shipps argues that historians of the West have skipped Utah, “circling all around the Great Basin, taking into account and telling

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Using Mormonism to Understand American Religious History

Over at the Mormon Wasp, Justin has presented compelling evidence that the oft-cited story about Leo Tolstoy describing Mormonism as the American religion is probably an exaggeration. It is true that Mormons have preferred to imagine a much more grandiose version of Tolstoy’s opinions of Mormonism, but an equally fascinating question is why have academics in recent

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