*Saints* and the Narratives of LDS History

Today Matt B. and I attended a release even for Saints, the new narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From the Church’s website, Saints is designed to share the stories of “women and men who dedicated their lives to establishing the LDS Church across the globe.” In due course, that means that readers will learn about landmark events in Mormon history, including those that don’t fit into traditional narratives of LDS Church history. The first volume covers 1815-1846, highlighting the global phenomena that led to Joseph Smith’s family moving to New York and closing with the Saints’ exodus from Illinois to the American West. To read more about the press conference, please see this Twitter thread (and follow us on Twitter). I’ve written some preliminary thoughts on Saints with quotations from LDS Church leaders and Church History Department leaders throughout.

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Summer Book Club: On Zion’s Mount, Chapter Nine

Over the past nine weeks, we have made our way through Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2008). In On Zion’s Mount, as we have learned, Farmer discusses the way Native and Mormon groups imagined and reimagined the geographical spaces among which they lived. Today we discuss chapter nine, “Performing a Remembered Past”; next week, watch this space for Jared Farmer’s response to our efforts here.

(Previous posts in the series: introduction; chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight.)

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JI Summer Book Club: On Zion’s Mount, Ch. 8

Welcome to the eighth installment in the JI’s fourth annual summer book club. This year we are reading Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2008). Check back every Thursday  for the week’s installment. Or, you can find them here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Please follow the JI on Facebook and Twitter.

I was eight the first time I remember hiking the Timpanogos Cave National Monument. After a hike, intermittent stops for Fruit-by-the-Foot, and what seemed like an eternal wait, my family and I stepped into the dimly lit tunnel that took me into the cave. I was a little nervous that my fanny pack would bump the wall and ruin some spectacular stalactite or stalagmite, which would lead to my immediate dismissal from the Cub Scouts. Towards the end of the tour, the guide pointed to an enormous formation with a light illuminating it from behind. “This is the ‘Great Heart of Timpanogos,'” she said. She told us the legend of Utahna and sent our group back down the mountain, with me thinking about the poor princess who had been willing to give her life for her people to survive a drought.

I don’t remember hearing the story again until the summer after I read On Zion’s Mount in a Utah history course at BYU. Suddenly the Heart of Timpanogos didn’t seem so full of wonder and sacrifice, it felt like a painful reminder that the mountain was more than a tourist attraction–it was a place shaped by the interactions of indigenous people and Mormon settlers. Moreover, it was a place whose value and meaning was shaped by the nation in which it is found.

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JI Summer Book Club: On Zion’s Mount, Ch. 7

I think about place names a lot.  I grew up in Illinois and Iowa, with a fascinating contrast between simply-named rivers like the Rock and Plum, versus those with rolling, multi-syllabic Algonquian names like Wapsipinicon, Nishnabotna, Pecatonica, and Kishwaukee.  In “Renaming the Land,” Chapter 7 in On Zion’s Mount, Jared Farmer invites us to consider the origins of Indian naming practices, not by Indians themselves, but by white Americans trying to appropriate those names for their own purposes.  Specifically, Farmer is examining the authentic and invented origins of the name “Timpanogos,” as a physical and symbolic presence of the Utah Valley mountain, rooted in both Ute etymology and Mormon folklore.  Farmer suggests that “The ‘Indianness’ of Mount Timpanogos begins with its name.”  Place-names, or toponyms, come in different categories, like descriptive names of what people see, associative names related to a specific site, incident names referencing historical events, transfer names that move one place name to a new location, possessive names that indicate ownership of a landscape feature, and finally, for Indian place-naming, the  inspirational, the invented, the commemorative, and the assimilated name, which might involve taking Indian names from one language and translating them or spelling them phonetically, for example.

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Q&A with University of Utah Press Acquisitions Editor Thomas Krause

We are grateful that the new Acquisitions Editor of the University of Utah Press, Thomas Krause, took time from his busy schedule to answer a few questions for JI! Please make sure to follow the University of Utah Press on social media and check out their stellar Mormon Studies titles.

JI: How did you enter in the field of publishing?

TK: I started in 2010 as an editorial assistant at the University of Oklahoma Press. At the time, I was a first-year graduate student at

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The Time Neil Armstrong Searched for Gold Plates

It’s true: Neil Armstrong led an expedition into an Ecuadorian jungle to search for gold plates. The story begins with a Latter-day Saint mission president, an eccentric anthropologist, and an Italian Catholic missionary. It ends with Donny Osmond. And there are aliens in the middle.

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GQC Journal: Mormon Conceptions of Race

This post is part of our ongoing series on the George Q. Cannon diaries, which are now published on the Church Historian’s Press website.

The George Q. Cannon journals provide insights into Mormon conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. Cannon had a long tenure in the Quorum of the Twelve, as a counselor to different church presidents, and extensive involvement in writing and publishing. Because of this participation in church leadership and publication, Cannon’s writings show how church leaders conceived of race as the church changed and expanded during the nineteenth century. I will give a few examples here of instances in his journal where he discusses racial ideologies, but there are many more.  

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New Authors at the JI

We are pleased to announce that we have added several new authors to our ranks! Please join us in welcoming them as perma-bloggers and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates!

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GQC Journal: Sealings and Adoptions

In 1894 Wilford Woodruff stood in general conference and announced a revelation that had a larger influence on Mormon cosmology than the Manifesto. Even though most Mormons today are unaware of it, this revelation was the bedrock of twentieth century sealing and genealogical practice. I’ve written about these developments in an article on adoptive sealing rituals and in my recent volume on Mormon liturgy.

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The Journals of George Q. Cannon

This post in our ongoing series on the George Q. Cannon diaries, which are now published on the Church Historian’s Press website, comes from friend of the blog Bill Smith.

“Suppose that one of the world’s masterpieces were to disappear, leaving no trace behind it, not even a reproduction; even the completest knowledge of its maker’s other works would not enable the next generation to visualize it. All the rest of Leonardo’s oeuvre would not enable us to visualize the Mona Lisa.”— Andre Malraux

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