“[T]he only thing that distinguishes Utah from Georgia is that it does not have jim-crow cars”: Wallace Thurman, Mormon Utah, and Blacks in the West

Although it may be surprising to many today, during the nineteenth century anti-Mormons often denied that Latter-day Saints were white. Mormon authors fiercely contested this argument, using republican discourses to portray themselves not only as literal but also ideological descendants of the Revolution. As Patty Limerick has argued, anti-Mormons waived aside these objections and gave the Mormons the same choice given to Native Americans during the 1830s–either renounce your cultural distinctiveness, or move west of the Mississippi River, where no whites live.[1]

Once the Mormons resettled in the Great Basin, they discursively constructed their territory as a place of refuge in contrast to the tyranny of the East. Perhaps due to their insistence on claiming whiteness, their Great Basin refuge had borders that were not only geographically defined but also racially delimited. Although sporadic attempts were made during the first few decades of settlement to live peaceably with Native Americans, by 1850 Mormons in Utah Valley

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… And a New Guest Blogger: Elizabeth

With Brett agreeing to come on full-time to the JI, we would like to announce of advent of the Juvenile Instructor’s latest guest blogger, Elizabeth. Here is her self-introduction:

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New Permablogger

The Juvenile Instructor is pleased to announce that Brett D. has agreed to allow blogging to take up even more of his time by becoming JI’s newest permablogger. His guest posts on Emma Smith’s historiographical past and future, the possibilities of 20th century Mormon history, and the Religious Class program of turn-of-century Mormonism generated insightful discussion, and we look forward to his future contributions.

Please join us in welcoming Brett at the latest addition to the Juvenile Instructor.

A short introduction to the little known Religion Class Program

Through my work as a researcher for the Education in Zion Project at BYU, I have become acquainted with one of the lesser known auxiliaries of the Church called the Religion Class program. To date, the only substantial work on the classes was an article written by Michael Quinn for the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1975. Other authors like Thomas Alexander (Mormonism in Transition) and Scott Esplin (Education in Transition, Ph.D. Dissertation 2006) have briefly dealt with the classes, but their treatments of the subject have remained limited. Considering the fact that the Religion Classes were an important auxiliary of the Church for nearly 40 years (1890 to 1929), this whole in our history seems quite remarkable. In my research for BYU and my thesis research, I have found the classes to play an important role in transition era Mormonism and turn-of-the-century Utah. Hence, I thought I would provide you all with a brief overview of some of the important aspects of this interesting auxiliary.

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Are Mormons Evangelical?

The problem, of course, is in defining ?evangelical.?

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Model Minorities?

I have recently been exploring Chiung Hwang Chen’s 2004 book Mormon and Asian American Model Minority Discourses in News and Popular Media which, along with her and her husband Ethan Yorgason’s 1999 Dialogue article, makes the case that the media has portrayed both Asian Americans and Mormons in the last fifty years utilizing what Asian American scholars have identified as a model minority discourse. [1] Although Chen is not a historian, the way that she tracks changes in representation over time feels quite historical and, in some ways, might be considered a continuation of what Terryl Givens was trying to do in The Viper on the Hearth. [2] Although I have some critiques of the book which I will get to later, I thought it might be relevant to also consider some of the advantages to her approach.

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Roundtable Discussion on Mountain Meadows Featuring Faragher, Barlow, Fixico, and Turley

Word of this panel has been around already, but I thought I’d draw attention to it here. I understand this presentation has been over a year in the making, conceived as a way to bring in fresh perspectives from a few of the nation’s foremost academics on the place of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in wider historiographical frameworks and how well the authors engaged some of these themes in their book. Enjoying sponsorship from a wide spectrum of individuals and organizations, this will be an exceptional opportunity not to be missed.

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What do we do with the Revisionist Emma Smith?

In recent years there has been a consistent effort on the part of Church members to provide a renewed influence on the efforts and contributions of Emma Smith. For my part, I have been encouraged to see the softening of the rhetoric which surrounded her and these efforts to understand the post-martyrdom Emma.

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From the Archives: The Mormon Reformation of 1856-57

I’ve been going through Joseph F. Smith’s letter correspondence from his first mission to Hawaii of late and have come across several references to the Mormon Reformation, which reached its zenith, according to most accounts, during 1856-1857. These letters surprised me for several reasons.

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To “Declare One’s Allegiance” When Writing Biography

Earlier this summer, in preparation for my first-time visit to Monticello in the lush country of Virginia, I read Joseph Ellis?s biography on Thomas Jefferson.[1] In the introduction, I was particularly struck by what Ellis described as one of the main struggles in writing on a man like Jefferson:

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