Guest Book Review: Dominic Martinez on “Remembering Iosepa”

Dominic Martinez {dominic.martinez AT ucdenver.edu} is currently a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Denver in the School of Education and Human Development with a focus on Leadership for Educational Equity.  He has presented papers titled “The Iosepa Voyage: The Reconstruction of Hawaiian Voyaging within Mormon Context” and “Iosepa, Utah: Reclaiming History Through Connectedness” at national conferences.  The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to share his review of Kester’s book on Iosepa.  

Matthew Kester. Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. vii, 203.  Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover: $44.35; ISBN 978-0-19-984491-3

I had the opportunity to meet J. Matthew Kester in the summer of 2009 when I was in Hawai?i conducting research for my Master?s thesis on Polynesian Mormons.  I was thrilled to meet this exceptional scholar with his laid-back, surfer-dude personality.  Our conversation focused on three main subjects: the history of Brigham Young University Hawai?i; a character from the Book of Mormon named Hagoth who is speculated to have been one of the first ancestors to the Polynesian population; and Iosepa, a community in Utah founded by Mormon Hawaiians.  Knowing his passion for the history of Mormonism and the Hawaiian culture, I was pleased to see that his first book to be published is on Iosepa–a space, according to Dennis Atkin, that has not been researched enough ⁽¹⁾. Other than Dennis Atkin?s Master?s thesis, his chapter, ?Iosepa: A Utah Home for Polynesians? in Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History ⁽²⁾ and Tracy E. Panek?s chapter, ?Life at Iosepa, Utah?s Polynesian Colony? in Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier ⁽³⁾, there has not been as much attention spent on this Mormon colony for Polynesians in the west.

Continue Reading

BYU and the 1984 National Championship

As part of this month’s series on 20th century Mormonism, I’d like to take a brief glance at BYU and the 1984 National Championship. For those unfamiliar with 1980s sports history, BYU won the national championship for the very first time in 1984. As a 2009 article puts it, “I can’t think of a more unlikely national champion … an unranked (preseason) team from a non-power conference.” I refer you to the article for an analysis of games played; today, I’m going to give you a few media perspectives on the win.

Continue Reading

Youth Trek, Public History, and Becoming “Pioneer Children” in the Digital Age

In 2009 our stake organized its first trek for youth conference and put it into the regular rotation for youth conference planning. So 4 years later, we repeated the event this summer with roughly the same itinerary and logistics and presumably will keep it going in future years as well. Now, you may know that I live in New England, not in the Wasatch front region or along anything remotely resembling a traditional handcart route. Treks outside the historical landscape of the handcart companies have become commonplace: unusual enough to generate local news coverage, but frequent enough that a whole subculture has sprung up to support and celebrate it. With some similarities to Civil War reenactment in its emphasis on costuming, role play and historical storytelling, youth trek evokes and romanticizes selected aspects of the Mormon past to cement LDS identity and build youth testimony and unity. It is a unique (and, I?m arguing, actually very recent) form of LDS public history.

I?ve now attended and had a hand in planning both of the treks our stake conducted, so I?m of two minds about the whole experience. A double-consciousness, if you will.

Continue Reading

Guest Post: Greg Prince on Hans Mattson & Inoculation of Church History

[The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to have Greg Prince guest post on  what has been termed “inoculating” in Mormon History. He received doctorate degrees (DDS, PhD) at UCLA in 1973 and 1975, and spent his career in biomedical research. He has authored two books on Mormonism, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood and David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism.]

In the early 1950s teachers in the Church Educational System met in Provo to write curricula for the Seminaries.  The committee assigned to address church history quickly became divided into two factions.  The “alpha” members of the two factions, both of whom became General Authorities a decade later, argued for opposing philosophies of how to portray our history.  One later observed:

“We were writing a Church history unit, and he didn’t want anybody to know that coffee was part of the overland trek.  I said, “What if the kid finds out five years after Seminary?  What are you going to do?  You’ve got a bigger problem then than if you just tell him the first time.  And you can tell them why, that the Word of Wisdom didn’t really get sanctioned until 1918.  So quit worrying about it.”  “I know, but we’ve got to protect their faith.”

Continue Reading

Guest Book Review: Seth Perry, “Mormons and the Bible: A Classic Gets a New Edition”

[Today’s book review comes from JI’s good friend Seth Perry, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where he wrote a dissertation on the Bible in early America, and will be a Visiting Professor of American Religion at Indiana University this fall.]

Since it was Philip Barlow?s Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (1991, 2013) that taught me to read paratexts, it seems fitting to approach Oxford University Press?s new and expanded edition of the book through the materials that frame it.

The back-cover blurbs attached to the new edition include these lines from a 1995 Dialogue review written by Scott Kenney, co-founder of Signature Books:

There can be no question that as a work of Mormon intellectual history this is a seminal ? and eminently readable ? work?.Mormons and the Bible has all the markings of a Mormon classic.

OUP likes the quote ? it also appears on my 1997 paperback. Characteristic of the genre, though, the blurb misses all of the subtlety of what Kenney was actually saying about the book.

Continue Reading

Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple (Edit: New Images, ht Mina)

A few weeks ago, I worshipped in the Manti Utah Temple for the first time. My parents were endowed, married, and sealed there, so it is a special place to me. Amidst my devotions and pondering, I was somewhat taken aback to find paintings of Mesozoic reptiles on the wall of the Creation Room. [1]

Continue Reading

Some fun web reference tools for Mormon Studies

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite web reference tools as of late with a short post. Among the many, here are a few of my go-to tools when researching all things Mormon:

Latter-day Apostles (http://latterdayapostles.org/)

This tool provides a fun way to visually browse the organization of the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1835 (with the formation of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles) to the present. It’s mostly a quick reference point for me with a question like, “Who was in the quorum in 1901?” The developer of the site, Dallin Regehr, doesn’t provide citation of his data, but I’ll assume it’s fairly accurate after checking the datum for a few people against other sources.

Continue Reading

Juvenile Instructor 2.0

In just less than three months (on October 26, to be precise), the Juvenile Instructor will mark its sixth anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, we will be rolling out a few changes over the course of the next few months—some cosmetic, some content.

Continue Reading

20th Century Mormon History: August at JI

“Seventy years ago this Church was organized with six members. We commenced, so to speak, as an infant’. We advanced into boyhood, and still we undoubtedly made some mistakes, which did not generally arise from a design to make them, but from a lack of experience. Yet as we advanced the experience of the past materially assisted us to avoid such mistakes as we had made in our boyhood. But now we are pretty well along to manhood; we are seventy years of age, and one would imagine that after a man had lived through his infancy, through his boyhood, and on until he had arrived at the age of seventy years, he would be able, through his long experience, to do a great many things that seemed impossible and in fact were impossible for him to do in his boyhood state. While we congratulate ourselves in this direction, There are many things for us to do yet.[1]”

“Free Toleration and Equal Privileges in this City”: Religious Freedom in Mormon Nauvoo

Several years ago I reviewed David Sehat?s then-new book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Published in 2011, the book was intended as a corrective to what Sehat characterized as the conventional idea that Americans celebrate an unbroken and unblemished tradition of religious liberty.  Demonstrating that America?s record of toleration and freedom isn?t flawless, Sehat chronicled many episodes of religious discrimination during the nineteenth century Although, as many revisionist texts do, Sehat?s book may have overcorrected, he introduced an important new awareness of the historical reality of not only religious persecution, but subtler forms of establishment coercion that existed in the land of the free during the nineteenth century. Mormons were, quite naturally, a constituency of Sehat?s work, though most of his focus was elsewhere. I expressed in that post my opinion that Mormonism presents a natural point of entry for the study of religious freedom in America. Because of their controversial practice of polygamy and their broad assumption of political autonomy, Mormons were at the center of much national debate over the boundaries of religious freedom in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and this something that scholars like Kathleen Flake, Sarah Barringer Gordon, and now Leigh Eric Schmidt have worked on in various ways. [1] Relatively less has been said, though, about how early Mormons themselves conceived and understood religious liberty. How did this eminently democratic idea, resting on a premise of ideological pluralism, square with Mormon political theology?

Continue Reading