Jared Farmer’s Mormon Image Collections

Jared Farmer has made available, for free download, two self-published digital collections of Mormon-related images. This is not really a review—it’s an endorsement.  

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Mormonism’s Possible Political Theologies: Reading the Constitution through a Lens of Continuing Revelation, Part II

In a previous post, I briefly explored the thought of Transcendentalist and abolitionist Theodore Parker to outline the relationship between antebellum biblical and constitutional hermeneutics. His biblical criticism bolstered his belief in the progress of religion and in the presence of an innate religious sense, which allowed him to dismiss as antiquated scriptural passages supporting slavery.[1] He used a similar approach to reject proslavery constitutional clauses as outdated. In contrast to some abolitionists, however, Parker maintained that those texts contained permanent truths that could be separated from transient teachings. Others went further in depicting the Constitution as a moldable and amenable text, including the dissenters in Dred Scott (1857)–Benjamin R. Curtis and John McLean–who followed some of the framers in suggesting that the Constitution had been crafted with the expectation that it would adapt to new contingencies, including the spread of egalitarian sentiment.[2] The realization of historical change and, in turn, historical distance, allowed some antislavery proponents to accept the presence of proslavery passages in the Bible and the Constitution without discarding those documents altogether. Positing their inherent malleability fueled the expectation of formal amendments, in the case of the Constitution, but also demanded informal reinterpretation. And, at least in Parker’s case, these approaches to the Constitution and the Bible overlapped.

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Placing the Short Creek Raid in the Context of the Cold War

Ever since rereading Elaine Tyler May?s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era for a second time during my first year of my PhD coursework, I became curious about how Mormon families, especially in the heart of the Mormon Culture Region, fit within the context of the idealized suburban Cold War family. I questioned how the religion?s history as an ?outsider? religion and group in the nineteenth century and the church?s long (and arguably an ongoing) transition, more or less, into the mainstream United States affected the typical monogamous Mormon family?s position and feelings of belonging and/or outsiderhood in the post-World War II era.  When pondering these questions, it is impossible to ignore the Short Creek Raid of 1953. The July 26th raid occurred during the especially heightened summer of 1953.  Just over a month before the raid,  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the infamous American accused of espionage, specifically passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, were executed.  Additionally, during the same week as the armistice for the Korean War was signed. The Short Creek Raid is not merely an event that matters within Mormon history but is illustrative of larger fears of deviancy that plagued the United States throughout the Cold War era.

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Breaking Brigham: Or, Methamphetamine and Mormon Tea

The original Heisenberg?

Over at the blog for The Appendix: A new journal of narrative and experimental history, Benjamin Breen has written a fascinating post on historical discoveries of illicit drugs. Capitalizing on the success of Breaking Bad‘s final season (a show centered around the dealings of a cancer-diagnosed high school chemistry teacher-turned-meth cook), Breen notes that while “the invention of Breaking Bad‘s blue meth has become the stuff of television legend” very few people “know the true origin stories of illicit drugs.”

After briefly covering “the first academic paper on cannabis” (penned in 1689 by British scientist Robert Hooke, who noted that ?there is no Cause of Fear, tho’ possibly there may be of Laughter.”), Freud’s 1884 publication extolling the virtues of cocaine, and “Albert Hoffmann?s accidental discovery of acid,” Breen turns his attention to “the strange fact that methamphetamine was actually invented in 1890s Japan.” In 1893, Nagayoshi Nagai successfully synthesized meth by “isolat[ing] the stimulant ephedrine from Ephedra sinica, a plant long used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.”  For those interested in the whole story, I recommend clicking over and reading the entire post—it really is quite fascinating. But one throwaway line caught my attention and will almost certainly interest readers here. Describing ephedrine, Breen notes that it “is a mild stimulant, notable nowadays as an ingredient in shady weight-loss supplements and as one of the few drugs permitted to Mormons.”

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The Beast of Almería and Mormon Lampreys, Mermaids, and Leviathans

Earlier this week an unidentified four-meter-long animal washed up on a beach at Almería, Spain (ht Kristine Haglund; see image below).

In some of the photos it seems that the animal has  horns, though subsequent reports are that the ?horns? are actually displaced bones protruding from the rotting carcass. I can?t think of any particular ?Mormon angle? for this particular beast, but since we?re in the neighborhood? there are a few things to be said, briefly, about figurative language, Mormons, and sea creatures of uncertain taxonomy.

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Musings on Archival Research, Methods and Workflow

…or how to hack your summer archives trip and come off victorious.

This post grew out of a conversation I had with fellow JI-er Christopher Jones during one of his lengthy jaunts around the Atlantic seaboard during his summer dissertation research. I have the good fortune to be located not too far from the American Antiquarian Society and could offer him room & board during his research trip there, and since I didn?t set foot inside an archives all summer I was living vicariously through everyone else?s treasure-hunting. We got to talking about archival research method: how we historians actually do what we do inside the archives, and reflecting on how we all get very little graduate-level instruction on the nitty-gritty of how to do this, and how it might benefit our JI community to have a broader conversation about it.

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The Mormon Cancer, 2 of 2: Republican Virtue and the Civil War

Last week I wrote about ?the Mormon cancer? in connection with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This week I want to look at how the metaphor fared from the 1870s to the 1920s. The take-home message is mostly the same: Mormons, with good reason, interpreted the metaphor as a call for violence against them.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

Has LL Cool J been keeping his faith in Mormonism secret?

In the Mormon Studies Weekly Round-Up, we try to present some of the most interesting and fun news items concerning Mormonism from the past week.  We also link to any relevant conferences, book announcements, and calls for papers.  This week, a New York rapper and former TV and movie star tweets a quote from Gordon B. Hinckley while a former NFL quarterback comes out publicly in support of gay rights.  Matt Bowman also chronicles the strange world of the Mormon supernatural and Blair Hodges provides a helpful guide to debates about the viability of Mormon studies as discipline.

General Mormon History

LL Cool J, accidental Mormon? Chris Jones and the Deseret News investigate.

Steve Young: Hall of Fame Quarterback, BYU Graduate, and Supporter of LGTBQ rights

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Hemming Village: Val and Alice Hemming and Memorializing Mormon Women’s History in Public Spaces

In yesterday?s post, “Eliza R. Snow as Dorm Mother and Concert Master” here, I wrote about the challenges faced when institutions fall short of representing their female members? historical presence, and how the limited efforts of BYU and BYU-Idaho have tried to meet those challenges in sometimes interesting ways, but have often fallen short. In contrast, I have also found an example, right here in Rexburg, Idaho, of how private individuals, families, or businesses, when equipped with adequate resources and far-sighted motives, can advance the purposes of public history, choosing to represent the contributions of women and other underrepresented groups in ways that tradition-bound institutions might not.

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Eliza R. Snow as Dorm Mother and Concert Master: Memorializing Mormon Women In Campus Spaces

One trip through Rexburg, Idaho, or any amount of time spent there, reminds visitors of the methods of honoring the institutional, religious, and pioneering heritage of western settlements, in ways that often emphasize the prominence of male actors in that history, and the absence, or lesser importance, of female actors.

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