Reminder: Mormon Women’s History Tea and Discussion Group

This is a just a quick reminder that a group of lovely lady historians and their friends will be meeting at the Marie Callender’s in Layton to discuss Mormon women’s history.  The group met for the first time last year and had a fantastic discussion of the role of material culture in women’s lives and in our historical reconstruction of them.

This year, we will be discussing:

An Article by Eliza R. Snow, which appeared in the Woman’s Exponent (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4tyhi78x48uedd6/ElizaRSnow_AnAddress_WEx_1873-09-15_v2n8p62-63.pdf?v=0mcns)

Neylan MacBaine’s presentation from FAIR (http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2012-fair-conference/2012-to-do-the-business-of-the-church-a-cooperative-paradigm#en16)

Lisa Thomas Clayton?s essay on revelation from Mormon Women Have Their Say, edited by Claudia Bushman ( http://www.amazon.com/Mormon-Women-Have-Their-Say/dp/1589584945/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370193985&sr=8-1&keywords=mormon+women+have+their+say)

It’s okay if you don’t get to all of the articles, but we ask that each participant make a concerted effort to have read at least two of the articles.

For the original JI announcement, see: http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/mormon-womens-history-tea-and-discussion-group-announcement/

We will meet at 4 p.m., Thursday, June 6th.  Note the slight change in time and venue.

Southwestern States Mission: The Trip from Utah to Texas

Later today I will start driving from southeastern Texas to Utah for the 2013 MHA Conference in Layton. Many JI writers and readers are in the same metaphoric boat this week, so I have chosen to write about the reverse trip: how missionaries travelled from Salt Lake City (SLC) to their assigned areas in Texas. [1]

Mission

The only time my wife and I went out to the movies in our 4 and a half years in Santa Barbara was to see Waiting for Superman.  My wife, Lee, had seen it the weekend before but wanted me to go with her because she wanted to be able to talk about it with me.  Lee works for the New Tech Network, a non-profit organization that is involved in school reform, and was therefore very interested in a movie that addressed those issues.

Seeing this movie about the plight of education in the US in general and urban schools in particular was a rather jarring experience for me because a number of years earlier I had taught high school in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles.  So I had an up-close view of what those schools were like (they struggle) and what kind of education the kids got there.  This was a rather painful memory since, because I walked into the classroom with no training (and very little aptitude, I soon discovered), I struggled mightily and delivered a very poor product to my students.  Thus I knew first hand of the educational struggles of urban children that the movie was documenting.  Again, this was a rather painful memory that also felt like a personal failure and I wondered what could possibly be done to address this problem.

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John Wesley Jones’s Pantoscope of California, Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons (1852)

Jones’s Great Pantoscope of California. Broadside, ca. 1852 from Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (Yale UP, 2002), 50.

Another post in the Mormonism’s Many Images series.

In late 1852 and 1853, a new and dazzling show debuted on the stages of Boston and New York. Playing to eager audiences, including the ?elite and intellectual,? John Wesley Jones?s Pantoscope of California. Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons became something of a sensation, running briskly for more than a year and garnering almost uniform praise from critics. It was, an advertisement boasted, the ?LARGEST PAINTING IN THE WORLD,? produced at the astronomical cost of $40,000. Audiences were thrilled by its stunning reproductive detail of the landscape; indeed, Jones claimed that his work was empirical, it was based on 1,500 newfangled daguerreotype images of the American West he and a crew had taken exclusively for that purpose. [1]

Jones?s Pantoscope belonged to the passing nineteenth-century genre of the ?panorama,? and to an age of experimentation with audiovisual entertainment. The absorbing experiences of radio and film were still decades away and popular entertainment remained confined to the stage theater. Panoramas took a variety of forms, but they often constituted ?moving pictures? in the most literal sense. Enormous canvas paintings produced by teams of artists?some reportedly miles long and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet?were rolled across the stage, moving across the audience?s line of sight from one giant spool to another. Accompanied by music and narration, these exhibitions simulated the experience of travel: they were ?designed to convey a sense of movement across space and time? in a uncommonly realistic visual world. For contemporary audiences, this was a new and delightful vicarious experience. Like the telegraph and the steamboat, the panorama was, some proclaimed, a ?wonderful invention for annihilating time and space.? [2]

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Mormonism as a Upas Tree

When I signed up for today?s slot in the Many Images of Mormonism series, I told Crissy I would write about Mormonism as a figurative octopus, but I was distracted by Edgar E Folk (1900): ?[Mormonism] is the Upas tree of our civilization, the octopus of our political life.? [1] I know what an octopus is, but what is a upas tree, and does civilization need one?

The short version: The upas (/’yoo-puss/) tree grows from Southeast Asia to Australia; its bark produces poisonous chemicals. In the nineteenth century the upas had a widely-known folkloric and literary life as the source of an air-borne poison potent and far-reaching enough to rival present-day nuclear weapons. References to the upas appeared in a variety of political and literary contexts, including criticism of slavery and of Mormonism. In some contexts identifying something as a upas tree merely suggested that the thing was undesirable. More developed versions of the metaphor implied that the target was so dangerous / evil that compromise was impossible and the whole ?tree? must be removed at the roots. By the early-to-mid-1900s upas / Mormon metaphors seem to have disappeared, partially due to the Mormon achievement of ?respectability? and partially because a more scientific understanding of the upas had penetrated popular culture.

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Southwestern States Mission: Boils and Other Skin Lesions

Caveat Lector: I have no medical training and this post discusses medical conditions, including those that suppurate, necrotize, and/or ooze. The medical aspects of the following post are, therefore, potentially both disgusting and unreliable.

A boil is a bacterial infection of a hair follicle resulting in a painful swollen area on the skin. [1] Four of the eight missionaries in this study report a total of ten instances of missionaries with boils. [2] I have not cataloged other types of skin lesions, but blisters and bug bites also appear in the diaries and affected missionaries in similar ways. [3]

Guest Post: David Walker, “The Mormon Image and Railroad Guidebooks”

[Another contribution to our Many Mormon Images series. David Walker (PhD, Yale University, 2013) will be joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, this fall, as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His dissertation focuses on intersections of religion, settlement policy, tourism, and technology in 19th-century Utah. His ongoing research projects concern theories of religion, citizenship, and historical progress formed through Gilded Age bureaucracies, land grant disputes, P. T. Barnum?s circuses, and Harry Houdini?s magic shows.]

This is a brief story about the religion of railroad guidebooks. More specifically it is a tale about railroad agents? efforts to re-imagine ? to package, promote, and to prescribe ? ?Mormonism? in the late-19th-century American West. Railroads, often in collaboration with LDS leaders, designed templates of national intelligibility for Utah and its Mormons, even while U.S. marshalls raided Utahn homes, businesses, and churches.

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Pinning the Mormon Image: on Mormon (non)distinctiveness

Last September, I wrote about the Mormon “hey girl” meme as a signifier of Mormon culture. I’d like to continue in that vein today when talking about Mormon pins on Pinterest.

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THE CHURCH: Non-Mormons, Ex-Mormons, and the Perceptions of Mormonism

Note: I have tamed my views considerably since high school. Not living in Southeastern Idaho for a while has helped.  Anyone who would like to critique my rash, abrasive high school self should remember their own foibles first and that I was acting from a place of pain and alienation.  I?m also not saying that Ed Decker or Fanny Stenhouse is correct in their depiction of Mormonism ? just that we need to take their geographic location seriously.

Recently, there has been a spate of work about how Mormons have been perceived in American popular culture.  Spencer Fluhman recently published A Peculiar People, which explores the role that anti-Mormonism played in defining what counted as ?religion? in the United States in the nineteenth century and what was dismissed as fanaticism and lunacy. J.B. Haws will also be publishing a book on the Mormon image in the twentieth century with the same publisher next year.  Cristine Hutchinson-Jones and Megan Goodwin have both written about the public perception of Mormonism on this and other blogs.  (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Although I have used a lot of this work in my dissertation

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Mormon Robots

[Part of the Many Images of Mormonism series.]

In the 2012 US presidential campaign candidate Mitt Romney was frequently described as a robot or robot-like. Mormons in general are sometimes compared to robots, the Borg (a cybernetic species from Star Trek), or Stepford Wives. In this post I will look at some of the context for using robots to describe people, particularly when those people are Mormon. [1]

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