Mormonism at Upcoming Historical Conferences

As most of our readers probably know, the Mormon History Association’s annual conference will be held next week in St. George, Utah. The program looks great, and a number of JIers will be presenting and participating. I look forward to hearing great papers, catching up with old friends, and hopefully making new ones. For those students who plan on being there, make sure to attend the student reception on Friday evening after the awards banquet at 9:15 pm; it’s a great place to relax and meet other young scholars studying Mormon history–plus there’s free food and door prizes.

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Mormonism and Agency: A Historical Query

Behold here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man: Because, that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light.

-Revelation to Joseph Smith, May 6, 1833 (Doctrine & Covenants 93:31)

“Agency” is a buzzword prominent in both of the worlds that I, and other Mormon historians, inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Within the world of Mormonism, the word signifies a central tenet of Latter-day Saint theology, one that receives regular and sustained attention from church leaders and in Sunday School curriculum. In the historical profession, meanwhile, “agency” has been labeled “the master trope of the New Social History”—signifying the collective efforts of social historians to rescue from the dustbins of history the lives and stories of marginalized figures, including especially African American and Indian slaves, women from all walks of life, and others who left behind few written records and lived otherwise unremarkable lives.[1]

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From the Archives: Wynetta Martin’s autobiography, Black Mormon Tells Her Story

In the late 1960s, a black woman named Wynetta Martin joined the church in California, finding in Mormonism a loving God with whom she could identify. Martin moved to Utah at a time when the church was seeking to diversify its public face in response to boycotts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and BYU. It was therefore a combination of her own tenacity as an individual (she drove all night from Los Angeles to make her audition) and the church’s need to adapt to changing circumstances that allowed Martin to become the first African American member of the Tabernacle Choir and the first black instructor at BYU (she taught classes on “Black Culture” in the Nursing department).

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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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Sagwitch: Shoshone Survivor of the Bear River Massacre, Mormon Convert

Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887. By Scott R. Christensen. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999.

Scott R. Christensen has written a landmark biography of Sagwitch, the Northwestern Shoshone chief who converted to Mormonism a few years after the Bear River Massacre of 1863. Sagwitch (1822-1887) witnessed one of the most transformative periods in the history of the North American West, when European and then American colonial powers incorporated Shoshone homelands into colonial and global economies. Sagwitch himself was a survivor of the incredible violence that American expansion entailed, somehow escaping when over three hundred members of his band were slaughtered by U.S. troops stationed at Fort Douglas in January 1863. For over two decades following the massacre, Sagwitch sought to rebuild his people within the religio-cultural milieu of Mormonism. Christensen has done an admirable job, utilizing ethnohistorical techniques, combining oral histories with Sagwitch’s descendants, a rich array of images, and archival materials.

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Columbus, the European Conquest, and the Radical Message of the Book of Mormon

Although the Book of Mormon never explicitly names Christopher Columbus, many readers have supposed that 1 Nephi 13:12 refers to he who ?sailed the ocean blue? in 1492. The chapter also seems to provide a theological justification for the European conquest of the Americas that followed in the wake of Columbus’ voyage (vv. 14-15; compare 2 Nephi 1:11; Mormon 5:19; 3 Nephi 16:9; see also 16:8; 2 Nephi 26:15). In this, the Book of Mormon does not vary that drastically from ideas then prevalent in the broader American society that justified the expansion of European settler societies across the continent, the concomitant decline of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and their absorption into white society.

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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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George P. Lee, First Lamanite 70, Dies

I feel like I’m the bearer of bad news lately. It has come to my attention that George P. Lee, the most famous product of the great surge of LDS interest in Native Americans that defined much of the post-World War II era, died this week in Provo.

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Peggy Pascoe, RIP (1954-2010)

Peggy Pascoe, a leading historian of sexuality, gender and race relations in the American West, recently passed away after a bout with ovarian cancer. Her research and career path resulted in a few Mormon connections. Pascoe’s first major work, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 examined Protestant female missionaries who established homes throughout the West to “reform” and help wayward women. One of her case studies included a home set up in Salt Lake City to help Mormon women who wished to escape from polygamy. The book remains one of the most influential and important books published on women in the West. Pascoe also published her magisterial What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, which treated miscegenation law broadly from Reconstruction through the late 20th century. Although What Comes Naturally does not include discussions of Mormons, the work includes important information that contextualizes our own troubled history with intermarriage. Pascoe’s other Mormon connection comes from her having taught at the University of Utah for a decade from 1986 to 1996. She’ll be missed.

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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