Lost Diaries, Augmented Memories: Joseph F. Smith?s ?Dream of Manhood?, Part 1

In September 2005, President Gordon B. Hinckley visited the Brigham Young University campus to dedicate the new Joseph F. Smith building, which houses the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences.  During his talk prior to the dedicatory prayer, President Hinckley retold a story that has been shared numerous times in talks, articles, and biographies of Joseph F. Smith; and has come to be known as Joseph F. Smith?s ?Dream of Manhood.?[i]  According to Joseph F. Smith, he had a dream while on his first mission to the Hawaiian Islands, a dream that he later affirmed ?made me what I am….[and] helped me out in every trial and through every difficulty.?[ii]

As Joseph F. Smith recalled, his mission was not going well.  ?I was almost naked and entirely friendless…. I felt as if I was so debased in my condition of poverty, lack of intelligence and knowledge, just a boy, that I hardly dared look a white man in the face.?  In these conditions, he was blessed with a glorious dream that makes little sense, but apparently offered him a great deal of comfort.

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“Linking One Generation to Another”: Dedicating the “This is the Place” Monument, 1947

At 6 a.m. on July 24, 1947, the centennial of the Mormon Pioneers’ entrance into the Salt Lake Valley, the first spectators arrived at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, Utah. By mid-morning, perhaps ten thousand cars were parked over several square miles, with as many as fifty thousand attendees waiting for the festivities to begin. They had gathered to witness the dedication of the sixty-foot tall ?This is the Place? Monument, which would honor not only the Latter-day Saint Pioneers, but also the Spanish, British, and American forerunners who had laid a foundation for the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin. At 9:30, the Boy Scouts raised the American and Utah state flags, while the U.S. Marines band from San Diego, California, began playing ?America.? Church President George Albert Smith, as master of ceremonies, introduced the program and delivered the dedicatory prayer. Speakers included J. Rueben Clark and David O. McKay, Smith’s counselors in the First Presidency; the Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, bishop of the Salt Lake Catholic Diocese; Rt. Rev. Arthur W. Moulton, retired Episcopalian bishop of Utah; and Rabbi Alvin S. Luchs of Temple B’Nai Israel, all of whom were members of the monument commission. The dedication marked an important occasion in what Laurie Maffly-Kipp has called the ?Long Approach to the Mormon Moment,?as Latter-day Saints sought to claim a prominent place both in the present and the past of the American nation.

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The Sacred Parking Garage Effect

I get dibs on this clunky coining, but I wanted to articulate something that I’ve noticed in the way many non-academy-trained Mormons approach history. You probably have recognized the same phenomenon under a different name (and I’d love to know what you call it).

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Conveying Joseph Smith: Brandon Flowers, Arthur Kane, and the Mormon Rock Star Image

(cross-posted at Religion in American History)

While pundits and theologians continue the seemingly endless debate over whether or not Mormonism is Christian/Mormons are Christians/a Mormon can be a Christian, over at Slate, browbeat writer David Haglund weighs in on the Mormon church’s latest advertising campaign (the “I’m a Mormon” campaign) and the recent participation of The Killers frontman and international rockstar Brandon Flowers in that effort:

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Quantifying Polygamy

This last week, FAIR went live with their Mormon Defense League website.[1] Among the “false claims” the website seeks to debunk concern the LDS Church’s current relationship to polygamy. In an effort to distinguish the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from polygamous groups in the western United States, the MDL emphasized that plural marriage was a limited practice that had been officially stopped over a century ago. (Including perpetuating the unfortunate rhetorical battle over the label “Mormon”–a battle of deep irony when considering our frustration of others refusing us the label “Christian.”) To answer the question of the number of Mormons who practiced polygamy, it replied that “modern estimates of LDS members practicing polygamy prior to 1904 range between 2% and 20%.” While the website does admit that it is tough to get an accurate number, and that it depends on who you count within the statistics, their final number (2% to 20%) is unfortunate in that it is not only false but misleading.

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Women in the Academy: Cynthia Lee

Cynthia has a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2009). She currently works as an independent researcher on projects in Computer Science pedagogy, and occasionally teaches undergraduate courses. She blogs about Mormon life and its intersections with pop culture and feminist issues at ByCommonConsent.

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The Lamanite “Great Reversal”: A Reception History of 3 Nephi 20:15-16*

Last Columbus Day, I wrote a post on Mark Ashurst-McGee’s dissertation and the radical and subversive nature of the Book of Mormon.

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“Owned by the white people”: America and Native Americans in Church History Sunday School Lessons, 1934

I recently moved, and in the process spent some time going through the several boxes of papers (consisting mostly of photocopies of archival documents, papers written for courses as both an undergrad and grad student, and old syllabi) I’ve accumulated over the last few years.

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Pioneer Day and Remembering/Forgetting Utah’s Indian Wars

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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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.

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