Introducing New Permablogger Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

We’re thrilled to announce that after an excellent stint as a guest blogger, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has agreed to join the JI as our newest permablogger. If you haven’t yet, check out her provocative post on bodies and the history of Mormon girls and her more autobiographical reflections on studying Mormon history and the labels we use to describe ourselves and our “Mormon” subjects. And then please join us in welcoming Amanda to the Juvenile Instructor!

The Tensions of Church and State, Public and Private: Tracing Mormonism’s Political Theology in the 19th Century

As the “world is governed too much” and as there is not a nation or dynasty, now occupying the earth, which acknowledges Almighty God as their law giver, and as “crown won by blood, by blood must be maintained,” I go emphatically, virtuously, and humanely, for a THEODEMOCRACY, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.               -Joseph Smith, 1844

I was at dinner a couple nights ago with some American historians discussing the current GOP election. Someone made the astute point that one reason this year’s primaries will likely go longer than previous elections—including the possibility that there won’t be a winner prior to the convention—is that the election rules have changed, most especially the way votes are proportioned in each contest. Typical protocols and boundaries, it seems, are now gone, leading to the rambunctious and contested situation we are currently in. Among those typical rules that have disappeared, someone jokingly added, was the separation of church and state. We all laughed, but at the same time sighed because we knew there was more truth in that quip than we would like to admit.

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Lucy Emily Woodruff Smith?s 1893-94 Diary: What it Reveals about Lucy, her Husband, and Ourselves, Part II

My first interest in the 1893-94 diary of Lucy Smith stemmed from her brief visit to the Chicago World?s Columbian Exposition of 1893.  ?Fair diaries,? as I like to call them, are difficult to find, especially those written by women, with those by Mormon women even more rare.  For my own scholarship, visitors to the fair potentially have much to reveal about contemporary American views on women?s rights, race, American patriotism, imperialism, technological progress and culture in the 1890s.[1]  Lucy?s diary didn?t give me as much of the cultural comment that I was hoping for, but a few promising nuggets.

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Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Unit 1: Joseph the Prophet

The first day of class we spent talking about perceptions of Mormonism using Pew Forum surveys (among others) as well as clips from a variety of TV shows like South Park and The Colbert Report. We spent the next two days of the class reading Richard Bushman?s A Very Short Introduction to Mormonism. Basically, I wanted to give the students a good overview and especially a vocabulary list. I think it was a very good idea, and it certainly helped the students get a good first look at many of the issues we will be dealing with.

For the first unit of the class we read large portions of Richard Bushman?s Rough Stone Rolling. Bushman?s biography is a good one for several reasons, but mostly because I think it?s a biography that takes the historical data at face value, yet doesn?t try to make metaphysical claims that go above and beyond the historical data.

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Scholarly Inquiry: Soliciting Questions for Paul Gutjahr, Author of The Book of Mormon: A Biography

Paul Gutjahr, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington has a new book forthcoming in about a month with Princeton University Press. The book is The Book of Mormon: A Biography. See an excerpt here, the table of contents and prologue here, and the first chapter here.

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Andrea Radke-Moss Joins the JI

We’re excited to announce that Andrea Radke-Moss has agreed to join the JI as our newest permablogger! Please join us in giving her a warm welcome.

Andrea G. Radke-Moss is a professor of history at Brigham Young University-Idaho, but currently on a two-year leave of absence to be home with her two later-in-life babies. Her book, Bright Enoch, a history of coeducation at land-grant universities in the 19th century West, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in 2008. Since then, she has published numerous chapters on women in the Great Plains, Mormon women at the Chicago World?s Fair, and women in higher education in the West. She is a contributor to the current Women of Faith series by Deseret Book. She is currently researching elite Mormon women?s and men? birthday celebrations in the 19th-century, and Mormon women?s experiences with violence in Missouri.

JI Resources on Blacks and the Priesthood

[Last week’s Bott controversy (See the Slate article by JI’s Max Mueller) generated not one but two official statements from the LDS Church. With all the discussion around the net on the issue of blacks and the priesthood, I’m posting this updated list of JI posts on the subject for your reference.]

Juvenile Instructor Posts

Paul Reeve’s excellent guest post about Bott’s remarks and dishonoring Elijah Abel’s legacy. This should be required reading. Here’s a sample:

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Repudiating Racism: A Black Latter-day Saint’s Response

This week’s events have produced some of the most succinct, thoughtful and probing essays on the history and implications of race and Mormonism perhaps yet written: here, here, here, and here.  Indeed, I love that we indignant white folks have raised our voices against the doggedly persistent and  painfully antiquated racial ideologies within our religion. Truly, I do.  I love that we?ve circled the wagons, that we?ve stormed the castle walls (pardon all of my martial metaphors, but they seem appropriate considering the climate.)  Our esprit de corps is admirable and convincing.  The problem is that some of our intellectualizing has perhaps had the counter-effect of privileging the white voices in our community over others who need to be heard from just as much, or moreso.  To that end, I present for your consideration the story and words of a a former student of mine, an African-American convert to the Church and a returned missionary– I’ll call her “Kris” . . . . well, because that’s actually her name.  Four years ago,  as a recent graduate in history, she took an internship in a neighboring state and attended the local singles’ ward.  One Sunday . . . . indeed, let’s give privilege to Kris’s voice, in a letter that she penned to her stake president following a disturbing incident in her ward.

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Guest Post: Professor Bott, Elijah Abel, and a Plea from the Past

Paul Reeve is an associate professor in history at the University of Utah.  He is the author of the award winning Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (2007), co-editor with Ardis Parshall of Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia  (2010), and co-editor with Michael Van Wagenen of Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore (2011). He is the co-editor with Jared T. of H-Mormon, an H-Net group set to launch in the next few weeks. His current book, Religion of a Different Color explores the racialization of Mormons and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Please join us in giving Paul a warm welcome!

There have already been a number of excellent responses to Professor Bott?s racist remarks to the Washington Post.  I write not in an effort to dog pile on Professor Bott, but in the hope of honoring what I believe was the intent of an unknown writer of an important document in Mormon racial history, Elijah Abel?s obituary (Deseret News, vol. 33, no. 50 (31 December 1884), 800). 

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Kindred Spirits: The 19th Century Origins of Mormon Posthumous Celebrity Baptism

Given the ongoing public discussion of the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead, and particularly how this ritual been conducted by Latter-day Saints in behalf of notable public, ?celebrity? figures, it seemed appropriate to post a piece of my ongoing research into this singular religious concept. Specifically, here I note the emergence of the doctrine and practice of baptism for the dead and how it initially came to be performed on behalf of celebrity figures. Of course, the development of baptism for the dead fits into a number of larger contexts, including currents of developing Mormon theology in Nauvoo (as Sam Brown?s new book shows), and into a broader culture where Christian baptism was a common but diversely understood and valued practice. So this post doesn?t explain how baptism for the dead came into being, but it does describe how, once the practice was established, it first came to be a way for Mormons of claiming those whom they saw as the deserving dead beyond their family and personal friends.

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