By May 27, 2012
How were mission presidents called and trained? I only have two examples, told from only one perspective, so I?ll simply give an ?and then? and then? and then?? narrative. Also: I think the correspondence loses more than usual in gloss, so I?ll reproduce many of the diary entries.
By May 25, 2012
Paul Gutjahr is professor of English at Indiana University. His book The Book of Mormon: A Biography was recently published by Princeton University Press. See an excerpt here, the table of contents and prologue here, and the first chapter here. In the hustle and bustle of the semester, I neglected getting your questions to Dr. Gutjahr until this week, but fortunately for us he provided these excellent responses quite promptly. We at the JI would like to thank Dr. Gutjahr for taking the time to participate in this series. Note: Grant Hardy provided these thoughts on the book and you can see Blair’s review here.
Q. While your research interests seemingly lend themselves to this project particularly well, I?m interested in hearing more about the genesis of this book. What motivated you to write it? What, if anything, did you find especially interesting and/or surprising? What other potential research projects dealing with the Book of Mormon do you see as promising/important?
By May 24, 2012
Mortensen, Joann Follett. The Man Behind the Discourse: A Biography of King Follett. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011.
A few weeks ago, a friend at church noticed the book I?d brought along with me that day and asked about it. Showing him the cover, he immediately responded, ?King Follett? Is there enough information to write a full-length biography?? At that point, I?d only read the first few chapters, and wasn?t sure how to answer. I finally finished the book a couple of days ago, but I?m still a little unsure about my answer.
King Follett, an early convert to Joseph Smith?s Church of Christ whose name is familiar to modern Mormons because of its rhetorical association with one of Smith?s most famous sermons, left behind no written record. No journal and next to no correspondence have survived. And posthumous biographical summaries offer little more than the most basic information about his life. With that in mind, Joann Follett Mortensen has accomplished a wonderful feat, gathering together the scattered references to her third great-grandfather (passing mentions in LDS church records, legal and public documents, and occasional (and almost always brief) references in the diaries and journals of his fellow Latter-day Saints) and turning it into a comprehensive and lengthy history (468 pp. + 4 appendices, a bibliography, and index) of King Follett and his immediate family.
By May 23, 2012
Anyone familiar with fellow JIer Christopher Jones knows two things: 1) he’s brilliant, and 2) he knows early Mormonism’s connection with Methodism as well as, if not better than, anyone else doing Mormon history. His dissertation, “‘We Latter-day Saints are Methodists’: The Influence on Methodism on Early Mormon Religiosity” is a wonderful introduction to the topic, and can be accessed here. He turned one of his dissertation chapters into an insightful article that was published last year in Journal of Mormon History on Joseph Smith’s First Vision and its relation to Methodist conversion narratives. (JMH subscribers can access it here.) He’s also mused on the relationship at a recent conference. Thus, if you have any question concerning the historic relationship between these two religious movements, he’s the guy to ask.
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]
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