“Oh! Woman, thought I, where is thy shame”: William I. Appleby, Intermarriage, and the Ban

Although I have drafted this post, I acknowledge that the idea for it and one of the sources comes from frequent commenter and guestblogger Steve Fleming.

As Connell O’Donovan has shown in his brilliant research on Walker Lewis and the origins of the Priesthood ban, Brigham Young initially did not see black skin as an impediment to a man holding the priesthood (unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from O’Donovan’s article). In fact, as late as March 1847, Young is quoted as saying that

Its [that is, priesthood restrictions] nothing to do with the blood for [from] one blood has God made all flesh, we

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Conference: Preserving Latter-day Saint History

The Fourth Annual Brigham Young University Church History symposium will be held on Friday, February 27, 2009 in the Conference Center at Brigham Young University. The conference, sponsored by the BYU Religious Studies Center in cooperation with the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, takes as its theme this year, “Preserving the History of the Latter-day Saints: Church Historians, the Church Historian’s Office, and the Recording and Publication of the Latter-day Saint Past.” Below is a preliminary schedule:

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History made and in the making: How do we understand Zion in this “new” America?

First of all, I would like to thank the wonderful bloggers at JI for their recent flood of attention to female subjects of history, particularly sister missionaries. I hope to contribute to the discussion of gender soon.

And second, and more important, is the day at hand, the day that comes once every four years, the day of inauguration.

Announcement: MHA Awards

From Spencer Fluhman:

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Mormons and missions: Daniel Fleming, civilization, and the ?lady missionary?

Inspired by Edje, I dug this out of the archives.  Originally posted in slightly different form here.  

By 1910, 55 out of every 100 American Protestant missionaries – a group numbering in the tens of thousands whose reach extended from the cities of the United States to Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America – were women.[1] Furthermore, the congregational associations who supported these missionaries were also dominated by women. Though it could be argued this merely reflects the historic gender gap within Christian congregations, such a boring sociological explanation was not how these missionaries explained themselves to themselves, or how their leaders lauded them.

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The Number of Sister Missionaries

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, jolly new semester, usw. to all. I?m still working on (read: doing stuff higher on my priority list at the expense of) the last installments of the ?Reading Like a Conspiracy Theorist? series. In that direction, however, I give you a ?cage match?: I put two articles in a steel cage with suitable quantities of folding chairs and then observed the results.

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Bowman on “The Crisis of Mormon Christology”

I picked up the latest issue of Fides et Historia last week and was pleased to find an article by JI’s own Matt Bowman. The paper, entitled “The Crisis of Mormon Christology: History, Progress, and Protestantism, 1880-1930,” is an expansion of what Matt initially presented at the 2007 Summer Seminar, and examines “how Mormon visions of Christ changed during a period in which their experience of culture was simultaneously destructive and creative: the tumultuous years around the turn of the century, which witnessed both the destruction of polygamy (and the utopian society it represented) and a forcible reconciliation with the United States.”[1]

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Gender Constructs and the Dissolution of the Religion Class Program

A few months back, I wrote a general post about the little known Religion Class program which lasted from 1890 to 1929.[1] One of the responses to this post noted the role of gender in this male-led program’s dissolution in favor of the female-led Primary program. 

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“May We Keep a True and Faithful Record and History of Thy Church and Kingdom”: Wilford Woodruff and the Preservation of History

[WARNING: Since my Mormon-related research for the next couple months will primarily be focused on Wilford Woodruff?s time as Assistant Church Historian, most of my posts will probably closely relate to that subject; be advised.]

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One of “the great achievements of American literature”: Mormonism in Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, Part 1

During Winter semester 2006 I attended Grant Underwood’s U.S. Religious History course at BYU.[1] Our text for the class was Martin Marty’s Pilgrims in their Own Land, a narrative overview of American religious history. Although Marty is widely recognized as one of the leading historians of American religion, his chapter on Mormons is, to put it kindly, lacking. Many of the students in Underwood’s class complained widely that Marty “got it all wrong,” and “if he’s this wrong on Mormonism, how can we trust the rest of the book?” I remember thinking that these students were missing a crucial point; the greatest value in Marty’s book was not in the details of his presentation, but rather in the placing of Mormonism within the wider tapestry of America’s religious history. I thought, “We can’t expect these major historians to know all the details. What is important is where they place us.” Similarly, a year ago Chris wrote a post on Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, in which Chris argued that the value of Sellers’s work was not in his admittedly-flawed discussion of Mormonism, but rather in the number of pages that Sellers chose to devote to Joseph Smith’s religion.

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