From the Archives: Vain Repetitions and British Heathens

In the June 1840 issue of The Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, editor Parley P. Pratt included the following short article.

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Joseph Smith’s First Vision and Methodist Conversion Narratives

There seems to be a minor discrepancy among Mormons today regarding the significance of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision.”  While modern Mormons are eager to point out all that Joseph learned in that first encounter with Deity in 1820 — the nature of the Godhead, the falsity of other churches and their creeds, and a host of other things — Richard Bushman has recently suggested that Joseph ?understood the experience in terms of the familiar? and ?explained the vision as he must have first understood it, as a personal conversion.? [1]  Perhaps we might be able to better understand the First Vision, then, and what it meant to Joseph Smith at the time, by approaching it in the terms Joseph understood it — as a conversion experience.  Because of Joseph’s stated partiality for the Methodist sect, and because it appears that it wa

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Narrating the Priesthood Ban and Constructing Selves

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons.

The way we see and define who we are is usually closely related to how we understand the past. Most of us have overlapping identities that require us to negotiate compromises between them and these compromises shape our narratives of history. African American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have two dominant identities, black and Mormon, and as such, they have the burden of negotiating a compromise between these identities

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The Haun’s Mill Massacre in Mormon Memory

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons.

In April 2005, I spent two weeks on assignment for the Joseph Smith Papers Project in Missouri and Illinois, visiting court houses and archives searching for documents pertaining to early Mormon history. On the second evening of my stay in northwestern Missouri, I drove down a lonely dirt road to a desolate place that had significant meaning for me as a Latter-day Saint. When I arrived, I found only a small creek surrounded by trees, grass, mud, and a small plaque that identified the site of the Haun?s Mill Massacre, where Missouri vigilantes murdered 17 Mormon men and boys in October 1838. As I looked over the site, I felt that I was standing on hallowed ground. I would not know until later that among the 17 wa

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“Plurality of Wives was an Incident, Never an Essential”: James E. Talmage on Polygamy

Historians can learn a lot about a people by examining the stories that they tell about themselves to others. When people wish to communicate something about themselves, they will usually pick some elements from their past to share. These narratives are highly selective, not only in the elements that are chosen but also in the language used to describe them. Present concerns normally shape what people share about their past, leading to the axiom that memory usually has more to do with the present than with the past.

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From the Archives: The Lord’s Prayer From the Book of Mormon

In reading through The Evening and the Morning Star, I came across an interesting piece in volume 1, #10 under the heading “Children”.  It reads in part:

“When the Lord gave the children of Israel commandments through Moses, he said, And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shall talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 

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From the Center to the Periphery: The Place of Sacrament Altars in Mormon Worship Space

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A Gift Taken, Any Gifts Given?: Contact & Exchange among Mormons

In 1925, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss termed the cross-cultural transmission of values, habits, and goods from one community to another after the two communities encountered each other, “contact and exchange.”  He argued that the “ritual exchange” of these “gifts” served as a way to define the social order of society. [1]

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Reading and Writing our Culture

In her novel A Little Lower than the Angels, Virginia Sorensen writes of a fictional family living in Nauvoo, Illinois.

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A Narrative of Intolerance: Ann Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Brigham Young

Although Mitt Romney avoided a detailed discussion of Mormonism in his “Faith in America” speech, he did include a brief reference to Brigham Young and the trek west. Romney situated Mormon history within a narrative of religious intolerance in American history:

Today?s generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation?s forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But

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