By August 28, 2020
By Mark Ashurst-McGee
In the previous installments of this series, I have given a brief history of the research Don Bradley and I have been conducting over the last three decades on the Kinderhook plates episode in early Mormon history.
By August 27, 2020
By Mark Ashurst-McGee
As explained in the previous installment (2 of 4), I had found what I believed to be the source of the content of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Kinderhook plates: The Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL).
By August 26, 2020
By Mark Ashurst-McGee
See here for the previous installment.
So, as I was saying, in the spring of 1996 I delivered a presentation at MHA in which I argued that Joseph Smith did translate (mistranslate) a portion of the fraudulent Kinderhook plates but that he had attempted this translation by secular methods. (For the basic outline of the argument, see the previous installment.)
A few months after the presentation, I found the source of the content of the translation.
It was in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.
By August 25, 2020
Mark Ashurst-McGee is Senior Research and Review Editor for the Joseph Smith Papers and a long-time friend of the JI. He is a co-editor (with Michael Hubbard MacKay and Brian M. Hauglid) and contributor to the recently published Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (UofU Press), which we highlighted in a recent guest post.
If I remember it correctly, I started studying the Kinderhook plates episode in the fall of 1990, soon after I completed my mission and returned to BYU—and there found the magnificent run of BX8600 books in the 4th-floor stacks of the Lee Library. I spent countless hours between there and the old Special Collections (with its stunning window view of Mount Timpanogos).
A decade earlier, historian Stan Kimball had obtained permission to conduct destructive testing on the one extant Kinderhook plate—in order to determine whether it was ancient or modern. In the late nineteenth century, men from Kinderhook, Illinois, claimed that the plate had been fabricated there in 1843 and then planted near a decomposed skeleton in a nearby American Indian burial mound. This was all in preparation for the excavation and “discovery” that followed. The problem was that, according to the History of the Church, when Joseph Smith was shown the plates he believed they were genuine and even translated a portion of their inscriptions. So, were the plates genuine or bogus? ancient or modern? The destructive testing conducted in 1980 conclusively demonstrated that the plate and its inscriptions were a 19th-century fabrication.
By July 13, 2020
Mark Ashurst-McGee is a friend of the JI and the Senior Research and Review Editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a Ph.D. in American History from Arizona State University and has published broadly on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint history. He co-edited, along with Michael Hubbard MacKay and Brian M. Hauglid, Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, which was recently published by the University of Utah Press.
This collaborative volume is the first to provide in-depth analysis of all of Joseph Smith’s translation projects. The compiled chapters explore Smith’s translation projects in focused detail and in broad contexts, as well as in comparison and conversation with one another. The various contributors approach Smith’s sacred texts historically, textually, linguistically, and literarily to offer a multidisciplinary view. Scrupulous examination of the production and content of Smith’s translations opens new avenues for understanding the foundations of Mormonism, provides insight on aspects of early American religious culture, and helps conceptualize the production and transmission of sacred texts.
By January 9, 2020
Hello JI readers! Please join us in welcoming The Woman’s Exponent Project, a digital history exhibit from Digital Matters at the University of Utah and the Office of Digital Humanities and Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. We at JI are excited to see the project come to fruition.
The Woman’s Exponent Project is a collaborative digital humanities and public history project between the University of Utah and BYU that explores the content of the Woman’s Exponent (1872-1914) that captures the fascinating, complex, and even contradictory history of suffrage in Utah. The Woman’s Exponent Project aligns with a unique moment in time, as Utahns prepare to celebrate the 150th anniversary of a Utah woman casting the first female ballot in the nation in 1870, a full 50 years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed universal women’s suffrage in America.
By June 14, 2019
“The techno-revolution has begun! Soon, robots will scour women’s words and discover the truth about everything.” Or, at least, that’s what I imagine Brigham Young would have said if he had read the University of Utah’s Digital Matters Lab and BYU’s Office of Digital Humanities’ preliminary report on topic modeling the Woman’s Exponent. Sounds like something he’d say.
The “Quick and Dirty Topic Model” is a sneak-peek at a larger project that will be released with Better Days 2020, which is the sesquicentennial celebration of women’s suffrage and the centennial of the 19th Amendment. It sounds like the results of the later slow and thorough topic model will be released in a digital and explorable format with the Better Days celebrations.
By May 9, 2018
We are pleased to present a Scholarly Inquiry Q&A with Seth Perry, Assistant Professor of Religion in the Americas at Princeton University and a past guest contributor to the JI. Professor Perry earned his PhD from the University of Chicago (whoop whoop!) in 2013, and he maintains an active research interest in Mormonism, which he discusses both below and in his article “An Outsider Looks In at Mormonism,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, iss. 22 (3 February 2006) [subscription required for full access]. He is also the author of “The Many Bibles of Joseph Smith: Textual, Prophetic, and Scholarly Authority in Early-National Bible Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 3 (September 2016): 750-75. See my overview of that article here. Perry’s first book, imminently forthcoming from Princeton University Press, is Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States.
By December 12, 2017
The following is a guest post from friend-of-the-JI Mark Ashurst-McGee, the Senior Research and Review Historian at the Joseph Smith Papers a
nd co-editor of several volumes in the series. He holds degrees in American History from Arizona State University, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University. Ashurst-McGee has authored award-winning graduate theses on Joseph Smith’s Zion project and the Mormon prophet’s use of seer stones and he is the author of several articles. He is the co-editor, along with Robin Scott Jensen and Sharalyn D. Howcroft, of Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources, forthcoming in February 2018 from Oxford University Press.
Early next year, Oxford University Press will publish a major new book on Joseph Smith and early Mormonism. If you are a scholar or an avid reader of early Mormon history, you will want to own and read this compilation.
By March 22, 2017
In Part I, I introduced the relevance of “fake news” to the beginnings of Mormonism by looking at the “Golden Bible Chronicles,” a serially published satire of the Book of Mormon published in Paul Pry’s Weekly Bulletin in the summer of 1829 – several months before the Book of Mormon itself was published. Noting that the “Chronicles” fit within a much broader culture of scriptural parodies in early America, but that it differed in one important respect: Unlike Benjamin Franklin’s biblical parodies of the eighteenth century, Paul Pry’s work satirized an unpublished book. It did so, I surmised, as part of an effort to emphasize (and mock) the absurdity of a boy from Palmyra translating ancient records.[1]
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