Multiple Brighams Redux: In the Midst of a Brigham Young Revival

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.

Continue Reading

Women?s History Series, Church History Library

The Church History Library will be holding a Women’s History Lecture Series for the second half of 2010. It begins 8 July with a lecture by Chad Orton, CHL archivist, titled “Those They Left Behind: Experiences of Missionary Wives and Children, Unsung Heroes of the Restoration”. Knowing the caliber of these lecturers and their work, the lectures will in no doubt

Continue Reading

Early Mormon Lamanism, Forgotten Apocalyptic Visions, and the Indian Prophet

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.

Continue Reading

Is Mormonism “understudied”?

I’m making my way through Jeffrey Williams’s Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), an admittedly revisionist challenge to the current scholarship on early Methodism that highlights the rhetorical violence in the sermons, conversion narratives, and personal writings of Wesley’s disciples in the early American republic. I may consider posting a brief review of the book (and noting any potential avenues for research in Mormon studies it may suggest) when I complete it, but for the time being, I want to focus in on one line from the book’s foreword, authored by Catherine Albanese and Stephen Stein, editors of the Religion in North America series of which this book is a part.

Continue Reading

Mormon Utah in the Progressive-Era West: Reviewing Two Recent Works

Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921. By Matthew C. Godfrey. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007.

Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform and Utah Coal. By Nancy J. Taniguchi. Legal History of North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Most historians are familiar with the Turner Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner’s once-dominant argument that American history was made on its margins, on the frontier, and that historians who put slavery and the east coast at the center of the nation’s past were off the mark.

Continue Reading

“Mormon history?s (and historians?) movement out of the margins”: The State of Mormon History and Mormon Historiography

In yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey explore what they see as the paradox of the current state of American religious history. On the one hand, more historians appear to be engaging religious history than in past years. They note, for example, that according to a recent AHA report, “religion now tops the list of interests that historians claim to have as their specialty” and point to a number of stellar offerings recently published in the field.

Continue Reading

Revisiting: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”

With Stephen J. Fleming

Normally articles take a back seat to monographs in terms of impact, but Lester E. Bush’s 1973 Dialogue article ?Mormonisms’ Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview? stands as a master work of scholarship that not only revolutionized how historians, sociologists, and other academics view the church’s history of race relations, but was also a significant factor leading to OD 2.

Continue Reading

Mormonism in a US religious history grad seminar

If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)

And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?

For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?

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

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading