By September 4, 2012
Recently, we here at Juvenile Instructor learned something that brings us great sorrow: Jared T., one of the blog?s original founders and most frequent contributors, had decided that the time had come for him to pursue other projects. Jared was present at the conversation at J-Dawg?s when someone proposed a blog focusing on Mormon history.
By September 3, 2012
Scholarly Inquiry is an ongoing series at the Juvenile Instructor. It aims to introduce recent scholarship in Mormon studies to a wider audience and to involve a larger community of scholars in attempts to situate the Mormon experience in wider contexts and new and innovative ways. Visiting scholars will include both Mormons and those from other faith traditions, as well as historians of Mormonism and those whose primary research interests focus on other subjects. Previous participants include Mark Ashhurst-McGee (here and here), Mark Staker (here and here), Stephen Taysom (here and here), Patrick Mason (here and here), and Paul Gutjahr (here and here).
By August 31, 2012
The Call for Papers is below. Please use this thread to, should you desire, make contacts, organize panels, and find other like-minded scholars planning on joining us in 2013
The 48th annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held in Layton, Davis County, Utah, on June 6-9, 2013. Our theme emphasizes the particular history of Davis County and other early Wasatch Front Mormon settlements, but also invites broad investigation of what ?Wests? of all types, times, and places have meant to various branches of the Restoration movement. Further, the idea of multiple Mormon frontiers challenges us to consider Mormonism?s encounters with other groups, cultures, and institutions.
By August 30, 2012
THE FOURTH BIENNIAL FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE
WESLEY THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
WASHINGTON, D. C.
FEBRUARY 22?23, 2013
By August 29, 2012
Professor Jared Farmer and the State University of New York at Stonybrook very generously posted a free e-book last week?Mormons in the Media, 1832-2012. Though the title should be “Mormons in American Media,” the 342-page book and the hundreds of images therein need to be seen. They are beautiful and brilliant?some impressively horrific in their full technicolor glory. Farmer builds upon a foundation established by Gary Bunker and Davis Bitton in their 1983 The Mormon Graphic Image, 1833-1914: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations and is able to radically enlarge it. The expansive scope of these pages can easily induce a little head spinning?the very best kind.
By August 28, 2012
On October 4-6, Gordon College will play host to the 28th biennial meeting for the Conference on Faith and History. Keynote speakers include David Hempton (recently appointed as Dean of Harvard Divinity School) and Mark Noll, and there are loads of fascinating paper topics that will be addressed. Most relevant to this crowd, there are two Mormon-themed sessions with familiar faces. Bellow you’ll find the panels, papers, and names.
By August 27, 2012
Continuing discussion of Women and the LDS Church: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Aug 24-25, 2012 Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah and the LDS Church History Library
Organizers ? Kate Holbrook and Matt Bowman
The perfect cap to my summer, which included more writing about Mormon women and their history than was usual for me, was attending both days of the ?Women and the LDS Church Conference.? On a personal note, it gathered many scholars I either knew or wanted to know, including nearly a quorum of the JI permabloggers, and I was thirsty to be part of the conversation and soak up some Western sunshine. The conference featured incredibly high-quality presentations and honest but never rancorous audience participation, and a warm Salt Lake welcome both at the gorgeous City Library and in the sandstone brick building of the Fort Douglas Officers Club on the University of Utah campus. Like a pilgrim to Lourdes, I came away with a vial of sustaining water. I hope we will be talking and thinking about what happened at this conference for a very long time.
By August 27, 2012
Overheard at this weekend’s conference: ?This could be Mormon women?s Seneca Falls.?
By August 26, 2012
A few days ago, I requested the Scott Kenney Papers at the University of Utah?s special collections. Inside Box 3 were some letters between Joseph F. Smith and Susa Young Gates written in 1906. I assumed that they would be about the manifesto or Susa?s recent trip to Germany. I opened the box and began to read one of the letters.
It began with a paean to Joseph F. Smith as one of the world?s great religious leaders:
Thou art a poet, an artist, a musician. A musician because the best and highest expression of the great masters finds an echo in thy soul. The great paintings are alive to you; and your words, written and spoken, often betray the very soul of poetry. The precious note I have of yours breathes poetry in every line. It is too precious to me for other eyes than mine, even to rest upon.
At first, I thought that Susa had simply developed a deep and lasting friendship with Joseph, but the next line caught me off guard.
By August 24, 2012
Neilson, Reid L. Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the Chicago World’s Fair. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 207 pp. + index.
Today the Chicago?s World Fair of 1893, also known as the Columbian Exposition, is largely lost from America?s collective memory. Despite the once-dazzling spectacle of its extraordinary landscape and architecture, all that lingers for most people now?if anything?is George Ferris? great Wheel, the risky engineering triumph that became the icon of the Fair. In its time, however, the Fair was perceived as the greatest American happening since the Civil War. It drew about 27 million visitors at a time when the national population stood at only about 65 million. The event galvanized the country in myriad ways, and profoundly dignified the city of Chicago.
Scholars often depict the Fair as a catalyst in American history. It had significant effects, for instance on the development of technology and architecture. Historians of American religion characterize the Fair and its Parliament of World Religions as a moment of growing self-consciousness for American Christians, a first encounter with previously unknown world faiths. It was the beginning, historians say, of a growing sense of religious pluralism. Together with the new scientific forces coming to bear on religion, this new awareness transformed American religious sensibilities in the latter half of the 19th century.
Reid Neilson?s Exhibiting Mormonism: Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World?s Fair, published at the end of last year by Oxford, brings the argument of the Chicago Fair as pivotal moment home to Mormon history, plotting the Fair as a critical juncture in the story of Mormons? relationship with the rest of America. As Richard Bushman?s jacket blurb notes, Chicago was the Mormons? national ?coming out party,? and in this slender volume, Neilson shows how the Fair and other such events transformed Mormons? ways of introducing themselves to the rest of the nation.
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