By May 20, 2012
In September 1857 a group of Mormons (and some Native Americans) attacked, disarmed, and then killed approximately 120 men, women, and children from an Arkansas-to-California wagon train. In the early 1900s this ?Mountain Meadows Massacre? was in living memory and Arkansas was part of the Southwestern States Mission. [1] How did Mormon missionaries in East Texas encounter and deal with it?
By May 17, 2012
We’ve been having a warm-spirited debate on note-taking in the JI backlist. On the one hand, we have Team Evernote (we’ll call them the good guys/gals); on the other, we have Team Zotero (for continuity’s sake, we’ll call them the bad guys/gals). One JIer—hint, it’s the documents and record-keeping nerd—thought it was unfortunate that people don’t talk more about their note-taking methods. So we are breaking the norm and discussing the work behind the published product. I’ll start the discussion and then open it up to everyone else; I’m sure there are a lot of tips out there to share on how to be more efficient in our research approach.
By May 13, 2012
I am not aware of any primary sources by women in the Southwestern States Mission near the turn of the century. The five traveling missionaries I have been studying did not write much about mothers. There are a handful of entries explicitly noting letters to or from ?Mother?; in 1900 President Duffin released two Elders on account of their mothers? failing health [1]; and Elder Clark transcribed a mission song wherein ?teardrops Stained a mother face? [2]; but that?s about it. [3] The Elders did, however, note work done by women they encountered and my not-yet-systematically-argued impression is that the Elders were struck by how hard the work was and touched when it was done for them.
By May 12, 2012
Mormon missionary history typically focuses on the histories of the white men who traveled from the gold fields of California to proselytize among the native Hawaiians or among Australians living in Perth and Melbourne. Although these histories can be engaging forays into Mormonism, my research recently has focused on the men and women who lived in Laie in an attempt to avoid American anti-polygamy legislation. Doing so has been a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of the early Mormon community. I have learned, for example, that Susa Young Gates loved a bit of salacious gossip, even though she often repented of it afterward. The women of the mission responded bitterly towards her, writing in one case that that woman could ?talk? in spite of being told that no one on the mission cared to listen to that ?rubbish.?
What has been most fascinating, however, has been reading about their various pregnancies and labors.
By May 11, 2012
There are three exciting events happening in El Paso, Texas this summer, July 28, 2012. A little over a year ago I found myself thinking about the impending 100th anniversary of what has become known as the Mormon Exodus in 1912 which saw several thousand Euro-American Mormons from northern Mexico colonies leave their homes and take a train first to El Paso (where some remained) and then on to other areas of the country in response to their concern for their personal safety during the Mexican Revolution. Though some returned shortly after (and two of these colonies remain to the present), for the families of many such as George Romney (Mitt’s father), this migration represented the end of a decades-old sojourn in Mexico.
By May 10, 2012
In recent years, historians have looked beyond Utah’s borders to Arizona as a fruitful place to explore the dynamics of race, gender, and class among Mormons in the American West. Two works that have appeared of late include Mormons as prominent actors in Arizona’s history, Daniel J. Herman’s Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (2010) and Katherine Benton-Cohen’s Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (2011). Herman examines the Rim County War of the 1880s, which violently drew together Mormons, cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, mixed-blood ranchers, and eastern corporations. Many Mormons, with their “code of conscience,” stood opposed to Southern whites’ “culture of honor” (although Herman is careful to note that these categories were always porous). Benton-Cohen analyzes interracial interactions in Cochise County between Mormons, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Apaches, Chinese merchants, white Midwestern transplants, white female reformers, Serbian miners, and New York mine managers. She asks how racial categories developed along with national identities in the borderlands. In both works, the authors use Mormons to complicate facile notions of ?whiteness.?[1]
By May 9, 2012
Today, I am going to be attending the Community of Scholars program, sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Each year, the institute accepts a dozen or so students from across the university into a seminar to discuss the ways in which sexuality, gender, and race intersect in their work. My friends and I sometimes refer to it as feminist boot camp. The competition for acceptance into the seminar can be intense, especially for those students whose work is in fields that typically privilege gender as a category of analysis. A few months ago, Brittany Chapman and I were bemoaning the absence of a similar space for people interested in gender to discuss their work in Mormon Studies. Although female historians like Claudia Bushman, Jill Mulvay Derr, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher began the process of unearthing a woman?s Mormon history decades ago, relatively little has been published in the field. Knowledge about the everyday lives of Mormon women ? the rituals surrounding childbirth, the difficulty in securing food and shelter during their husbands? absences as missionaries, the development of bonds between sister wives and children, the inspection of homes through Retrenchment Societies, and the ways in which they maintained contact with their families in the East, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the Pacific ? remains fragmentary at best.
By May 8, 2012
(The following is cross-posted, with permission, from the stupendous blog Feminism and Religion. If you haven’t been reading their fascinating and sophisticated material, repent and bookmark their site today.)
Readers of FAR have been treated to a number of posts over the past few months from members of the ?Gendering Mormonism? class I taught this semester at Claremont Graduate University. I was fairly apprehensive in offering the course. For one, I?m not a scholar of gender, gender studies, feminist theory, feminist theology, queer studies, queer theology, or anything related?I?m a historian of American religion, and most of my training to that effect was about the white guys in American religion (most of whom, you?ll be shocked to learn, weren?t exactly feminists). I have also spent some time in international peace studies, where I got a crash course in issues of gender justice. But I entered this course as a relative novice. This is one of the fun things about being a member of a graduate faculty?as a professor I don?t have to pretend to be the fount of all wisdom all the time, and I learn a lot from students who are often more expert in a particular field than I am.
By May 7, 2012
[The most recent installment of our “Responses” series, in which someone responds to a recent article of interest in Mormon studies.]
As someone interested in the historical development of LDS thought, especially during the first few decades, I was excited to see Lynne Hilton Wilson?s fascinating ?A New Pneumatology: Comparing Joseph Smith?s Doctrine of the Spirit with His Contemporaries and the Bible? (BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 1 [2012]: 119-152). Historical theology and intellectual history can be a tricky field, particularly when contextualizing someone?s ideas with the surrounding culture, though it can be highly rewarding when done right. However, while there was much to enjoy in the article, there were some aspects that made me pause. Besides disagreements with how Wilson presents Joseph Smith?s Protestant culture in general, often in attempt to make Mormon ideas more distinct from antebellum America, as well as disagreements with how she interprets Smith?s theology in particular, often in attempt to make his 1830 beliefs more consistant with those in 1844, there were a few methodological points that I think deserve examination.
By May 6, 2012
How did Mormon missionaries around 1900 understand and act against Satan and his incorporeal minions? The diaries point mostly to literal belief in sentient, personal beings that actively worked against the Elders by influencing understandings and feelings. [1] There are a few acknowledgments of the possibility of possession, but no instances of it. In three cases the Elders report the direct detection of evil spirits (rather than deducing influence from the unreceptiveness of the people) but there are no mentions of exorcism: these Elders resisted Satan by living gospel principles and persuading others to do the same.
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