By GuestFebruary 22, 2013
Friend of JI and all-around awesome person Melissa Inouye has initiated a wonderful project. Can you help?
___________________________
As Mormonism continues to develop internationally, so too does the field of Mormon studies. More and more foreign scholars are looking to do work in the area, but often lack the requisite resources. The International Mormon Studies Book Project is a new effort to provide critical resources for developing Mormon studies internationally by purchasing books to form a base Mormon studies collection at institutions where scholars have demonstrated a keen interest in doing research on Mormonism. Currently, institutions interested in partnering with the IMS Book Project span the globe, from Asia to Australia to Europe. The first two IMS Book Project collections are slated for donation to Jianghan University) in Wuhan, China, and the newly formed French Institute for Research on Mormonism (Institut Français pour la Recherche sur le Mormonisme) in Bordeaux, France.
Continue Reading
By February 21, 2013
By Armand Mauss
Note: The following is an excerpt from Prof. Mauss’ recent memoir, Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport: Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic (UofU Press, 2012), which Prof. Mauss kindly shared with the Juvenile Instructor for inclusion in our Black History Month series. The memoir (which everyone should buy and read!) has received some attention in the ‘nacle here and here.
All during this post-1978 period, I remained in periodic personal contact with many black LDS friends, especially those in the Genesis Group.27 As conversations with my black LDS friends made clear, the circulation of this repackaged folklore greatly hindered the conversion and retention of new black members. I became well acquainted personally with one case, in particular, which produced a major national news story in 1998. This was the case of a middle-aged black couple named Jackson, who lived in Orange County, California. Betty Jackson happened to be a coworker with one of my sons at the Mazda Corporation, and through friendly conversation, each discovered that the other was a member of the LDS Church. The Jacksons had only very recently been converted along with one or two of their children. Having learned of the traditional LDS racial teachings and policies only after joining the Church, the Jacksons were having considerable trouble in accommodating the new information. My son gave Betty a copy of the Bush & Mauss Neither White nor Black in hopes that it might help them understand and deal with the matter, which it did to some extent.
Continue Reading
By February 19, 2013
By Quincy D. Newell
Jane Manning James (Wikimedia Commons)
Jane James haunts me. Not in the way you?re thinking?I don?t see her ghostly specter on cold evenings, or hear her humming a tune in the other room as I?m trying to sleep. What I mean is that she just won?t let me go. Every time I learn something new about her, it seems that I go down a rabbit hole. It takes me days to return, mentally, to whatever I was doing. James, an African American woman who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s, moved to Nauvoo after her conversion and worked as a servant in Joseph Smith?s home. After Smith?s death, she worked for Brigham Young. She was in one of the first companies to arrive in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and she remained a faithful Latter-day Saint until her death in 1908. She left a pretty substantial paper trail, including a short autobiography, an interview with the Young Woman?s Journal, appearances in the Woman?s Exponent, and multiple petitions to church leaders for endowments and sealings. (The largest published collection of this material is in Henry J. Wolfinger, ?A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,? in Social Accommodation in Utah, ed. Clark S. Knowlton, American West Center Occasional Papers [Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1975], 126-172. I have a new transcription of James?s autobiography and a reprint of that Young Woman?s Journal interview coming out in the Journal of Africana Religions this spring.)
Continue Reading
By Ben PFebruary 18, 2013
After the battles over New Mormon History in the 1980s and early 90s, Mormon historians (and I mean historians who are Mormon, not just historians who study Mormons) have been hesitant to discuss the relationship between faith and history. Or so I argue in a paper I’m presenting this weekend at the Conference on Faith & Knowledge (schedule here). In preparation for my paper, I’ve revisited a number of classic historigraphical texts from decades ago, and have been surprised by two things: 1) the amount of attention this thorny issue was given by earlier scholars in the field, and 2) the lack of engagement to a similar degree by today’s generation. There are, I think, several reasons for this, which I attempt to outline in the paper. But in this post I merely want to present a couple quotations from Richard Bushman’s classic essay “Faithful History” (pdf here), published almost five decades ago, and invite discussion.
Continue Reading
By February 18, 2013
The Mormon Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion is accepting paper proposals for the AAR Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, November 23-26, 2013. Proposal submissions are due on March 1. We are particularly looking for papers on the following topics:
Continue Reading
By Edje JeterFebruary 17, 2013
Note: this post contains racial epithets.
As described last week, Mormon missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission (especially those in eastern Texas) had occasion to interact with and observe many African Americans. The missionaries in this study referred explicitly to African Americans in ninety-one diary entries. In this (and next week’s) post I will evaluate the racial epithets the missionaries used.
Continue Reading
By February 16, 2013
JWHA Best Article Award Criteria
Award Criteria
Judges will select the best articles (privileging works that are most relevant to Community of Christ history or theology, regardless of the time period they encompass) based on the following criteria:
Articles published in the calendar year prior to the award.
Continue Reading
By February 16, 2013
The Church History Department announces an opening for a one-year internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project. This will be a full-time temporary position beginning in April 2012.
Continue Reading
By Ben PFebruary 15, 2013
?Beyond the Mormon Moment: Directions for Mormon Studies in the New Century?
A Conference in Honor of the Career of Armand Mauss
Claremont School of Arts & Humanities
Department of Religion
March 15-16, 2013
Conference Schedule
All sessions will be held in Albrecht Auditorium at 925 N. Dartmouth Avenue.
Continue Reading
By Natalie RFebruary 14, 2013
In February of 1892, Twenty-two year old Amelia Cannon mentioned the upcoming Valentine?s Day in her journal: ?Valentine?s Eve. I expect none of the fruits of this holiday. Two years ago this winter was the last time I was the recipient of a love token on Valentine?s Day.?[1] It was not that Amelia was lacking in male attention?as her schedule was full of social engagements with various young men?yet her mentioning of the holiday references the weight that Valentine?s Day, a holiday centered upon romantic love a
nd courtship, carried and still carries. Of course, Valentine?s Day seems no better time to ponder how the actual practice of courtship (and later dating) has changed in the United States. As a historian of American gender history, I have spent a lot of time reading and reviewing Beth L. Bailey?s aptly titled 1988 monograph From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Bailey surmises that due to changes in consumption, the economy, and gender roles between men and women courtship began to occur more in public places instead of the ?sheltering and controlling contexts of home and local community.? [2] Socializing in public spaces afforded courting couples more anonymity and privacy then they previously held. As I have delved further and further into my research, I have wondered how the example of Mormon courtship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century fit with other trends which affected the way men and women courted? Did Mormon courtship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evolve into a private practice in a public world?
Continue Reading
Newer Posts |
Older Posts
Recent Comments
Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “Interesting, Jack. But just to reiterate, I think JS saw the SUPPRESSION of Platonic ideas as creating the loss of truth and not the addition.…”
Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “Thanks for your insights--you've really got me thinking. I can't get away from the notion that the formation of the Great and Abominable church was an…”
Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “In the intro to DC 76 in JS's 1838 history, JS said, "From sundry revelations which had been received, it was apparent that many important…”
Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “"I’ve argued that God’s corporality isn’t that clear in the NT, so it seems to me that asserting that claims of God’s immateriality happened AFTER…”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “But that's not what I was saying about the nature of evidence of an unknown civilization. I am talking about linguistics, not ruins. …”