Roll over Bruce R. McConkie: Creating Mormon History Playing Cards

I recently returned from my vacation to Tahiti.  While I was there, I discovered a set of playing cards where each of the cards was a different person from Tahitian history from the reign of Queen Pomare.  Iotete, a Tahitian chief who signed a document requesting that the French annex the islands, appears on a blue card wearing a feathered headdress and a red European-style coat.  The card also shows him as being heavily tattooed and wearing a grim expression.  Another card depicts Constance Gordon-Cumming, a Scottish travel writer who traveled to Tahiti in the 1870s and wrote extensively about her travels.  She appears as a young woman, dressed in a stylish red hat and yellow ribbons.  Although the Mormon missionaries Addison Pratt, Benjamin F. Grouard, and James Brown had their own corner (complete with facsimiles of their journals) in the Musee de Tahiti, they didn’t make the cut for the playing cards.

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Mormon History Journals Roundup, Spring 2013

Though the weather refuses to acknowledge it, at least here in New England, spring has arrived. Among other things, this typically means new issues from academic journals. And since we are your trusted friends and colleagues here at the JI, and we hate to see you get bogged down and fall behind the ever-proceeding deluge of Mormon historical scholarship, we have a roundup of recent articles that deserve your attention.

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Southwestern States Mission: Discreet Sisters, Part 2

In last week?s post I looked at the public linguistic context for the phrase, ?faithful, discreet sisters,? in Sister Carling?s mission call. This week I look at her private writings.

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I?m Bored: Responses to Mormonism in the Pacific

This week, I am traveling throughout New Zealand and Tahiti, partially as a vacation and partially as an initial foray into two of the countries that I write about in my dissertation.  As someone who works on Mormon missionaries in the South Pacific and Great Britain, I spend a lot of time reading the journals, diaries, and letters of Protestant missionaries who have encountered Mormons in their mission stations and among their congregations.  Sometimes their comments are unsurprising ? the usual vituperative rants about golden plates and polygamy that you would expect to find in the writings of any non-Mormon who had encountered Mormon missionaries for the first time.  At other times, the letters and diaries that I read can be surprising in their lack of interest and nonchalance about the appearance of sudden appearance of Mormonism. 

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Of Mormons and Baseball

I make it out to the US most summers, but when I don’t, there is one thing I miss more than absolutely anything: a baseball game. I have many fond memories of exciting baseball games in the heat of summer, cheering on my beloved Oakland A’s or San Francisco Giants (we’re equal opportunity Bay Area supporters at my house). And since April is the month of Opening Day, I thought I’d round up something about Mormons and baseball.

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From the Archives: GQ Cannon Narrates Part of the Decision to Call Sister Missionaries, 1898

The first official, female, Mormon missionary was set apart on 1898 March 27.  Ten days later, George Q Cannon, First Counselor in the First Presidency, spoke at General Conference. As presented in the conference report, he spent 2 out of 14.5 columns on the decision to call female missionaries. Below I give a five-hundred-word summary for those of you in a hurry and then the unbroken thirteen-hundred-word excerpt.

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Southwestern States Mission: Discreet Sisters, Part 1

Sister Carling?s mission call identifies ?faithful, discreet sisters? as candidates for missionary service. [1] Perhaps I have an idiosyncratic definition, but I think ?discreet? is ?prudently silent and/or unobtrusive,? [2] which seems odd as a primary descriptor for go-ye-into-all-the-world missionaries—and doubly so parallel to the ?faithful, energetic elders? in males? mission letters. [3] Below I will attempt to contextualize the idea of ?discreet? female, Mormon missionaries in the Progressive Era. [4]

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Boycotting General Conference 40 Years Ago: The Lamanite Generation, the American Indian Movement, and Temple Square

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at the University of Michigan on what benefits there might be to considering Utah as a settler colonial space.  As part of a section on the political implications of adopting such a posture, I included some photos of the Lamanite Generation, a group of BYU students who toured the United States as part of an all-native choir.  Afterwards, one of my friends who studies twentieth-century American Indian history came up to me.  She was horrified:  ?That?s when the American Indian Movement was happening.  Hadn?t they heard of it??

I didn?t know the answer.  The American Indian Movement (AIM) was a radical movement founded in the late 1960s that protested the poverty and violence that was endemic among native communities in the twentieth century.  They staged massive protests that insisted that Americans recognize that its treaties with native tribes were not being honored and that many of the most iconic buildings and monuments in the United States were on land that, by treaty, belonged to American Indians.

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New Book Notice: Matthew Kester, Remembering Iosepa

This is the part of the year when posting slows down here at JI, as the end of another semester–and the prospect of final papers, grading, committee duties, etc.–cuts into our precious blogging time.

But scholarship still presses forward! This week, I received a review copy of Matthew Kester’s new and exciting Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the West, just released by Oxford University Press. Kester, a professor and archivist at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, explores a group of Hawaiin converts who joined the Mormon church, immigrated to Utah, established their own community in the middle of Deseret’s desert, yet eventually moved back to their homeland after the Laie Temple was built. I remember first hearing about this story when working on the Church’s Historic Sites Committee, and Benjamin Pykles, who also works on Mormon notions of space and has written an excellent book on Nauvoo, gave a presentation on the topic. Just the image of native Hawaiins building their own oasis in the desert is fascinating, and the story becomes even more interesting as you peel back the layers.

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On Sacred Space, Carpets and Embodied Belief

[The following is a guest post from our good friend and former co-blogger Kris Wright.]

In the first sentence of the introduction to Women and Things 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies, editors Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin write

This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women?s decorative arts and homecraft activities as sites of important cultural and social work.[1]

I will admit that when I read that, I thought it might be a bit of hyperbole ? neglected, yes, but despised?  That seemed like an exaggeration. However after listening to President Elaine S. Dalton?s Conference address, ?We Are Daughters of Our Heavenly Father? and observing some of the online reaction to it, I am starting to wonder if despised is actually a good descriptor. Such reaction can shed light on why modern historians ignore Mormon women or have a difficult time integrating them into their work.

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