From the Archives: “A Sample of Pure Language,” Part I (The Text)

While JI has not done one recently, we have from time to time written a “From the Archives” post where we pluck from the historical archives an interesting document as a way to highlight an important theme, offer a new interpretation, or merely start an enlightening discussion. This post is aimed to do all of the above, only perhaps even more so because of the interesting nature of this particular document. It offers so many possibilities for interpretation, in fact, that I have asked three knowledgeable historians to give their take on it from their individual backgrounds and expertise.

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Book Review: Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.

On Zion?s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer?s Ph.D. dissertation

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Mormonism in a US religious history grad seminar

If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)

And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?

For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?

Book Review: Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Building off of Christopher’s recent review of Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, I though I would post a recent review I’ve written on an important historical text that, while not directly addressing Mormonism, offers intriguing questions and approaches that we can apply to Mormon history. The first section is my review of Howe’s fascinating volume, while the second section provides a few paragraphs on how we can relate it to Mormon studies.

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Thoughts on Polyandry

I’ve frequently seen complaints that Joseph Smith’s practice of marrying already-married women is “particularly troubling.” That is, that marrying married women is somehow worse than marrying single women. Why is that? Why is men sharing a wife somehow worse than women sharing a husband?

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Of Hips and Miracles

My daughter was diagnosed with Perthes yesterday. It’s a condition where blood doesn’t get to the hip bone and so it doesn’t grow, which causes all kinds of problems. She’s been having a lot of difficulty walking recently but the doctor says its very treatable and for this we are grateful.

Her condition reminded me of a few stories from the past that I’ve read recently.

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Mormonism and the Republican Party

I’ve written previously on ways Mormon historians can transcend the 1890 rupture and begin to conceptualize and integrate the twentieth century into narratives of Mormon history. I suggested that one way to do this is to historicize contemporary issues, such as those surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and show how the past can illuminate the present. Some may protest that this approach is overly-presentist, but I would argue that all history is presentist to one degree or another, and as historians we should be writing histories that are useful and useable.

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History ?thrown into divinity? ? some thoughts on faith, the past, and the historical profession

I

One of Max Weber?s more evocative phrases is the ?disenchantment of the world.? I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.

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Joseph Smith Papers Job Opening!

I ran into Reid Neilson earlier this week and he mentioned that a job would be opening up at the JSPP. He recently emailed me the job description to post here for all interested.  Good luck to all applicants!

Historian/Documentary Editor, Joseph Smith Papers Project-0900581

E. Dale LeBaron, Former BYU Religion Professor, Killed in an Auto-Pedestrian Accident

E. Dale Lebaron, former BYU Professor and president of the South African Mission when the Priesthood ban was rescinded died on Thursday, Dec. 3 from injuries sustained in an auto-pedestrian accident near his home. See this story in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Lebaron was known as an avid student of the history of the Church in Africa and devoted much time collecting oral histories and other documentation. He gave multiple presentations and authored a book on African conversions, All Are Alike Unto God.

I must admit that I’m not very familiar with his work, but feel it appropriate to make mention of this tragic circumstance that befell a collector and documenter of African Mormon history. His decades long involvment with the Church in Africa both before and after the 1978 revelation makes me hope that he was himself interviewed about his activites and/or that he kept a journal of his doings. LeBaron was 75.