By Ben PAugust 28, 2012
On October 4-6, Gordon College will play host to the 28th biennial meeting for the Conference on Faith and History. Keynote speakers include David Hempton (recently appointed as Dean of Harvard Divinity School) and Mark Noll, and there are loads of fascinating paper topics that will be addressed. Most relevant to this crowd, there are two Mormon-themed sessions with familiar faces. Bellow you’ll find the panels, papers, and names.
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By ChristopherJune 30, 2012
Highest MHA award
Leonard J. Arrington Award
William G. Hartley?citation attached
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By MaxFebruary 4, 2012
On the fifteenth floor in a Columbia University building overlooking a majestic New York City skyline, some of the most well known scholars of Mormonism (–and me–) gathered to present papers on the role of Mormonism and American politics during this so-called ?Mormon Moment.? Professors and students from Columbia and other NYC-area universities, a handful of LDS missionaries (including a JIer?s parents!) and reps from local and international news outlets, braved unreliable elevators to bring the large lecture hall to capacity on both days of the conference.
According to co-organizer, Jana Riess, Columbia?s Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life had hoped to hold such an event for years. And with Romney?s train to the nomination in Tampa back on track?CNN just flashed that Romney won the Nevada Caucuses by twenty-three points?timing could not have been better. Dr. Riess, her co-organizer and former doctoral advisor, Randall Balmer, as well as the Institute?s staff, deserve heaps of praise for a smoothly run and stimulating event, the fruits of which will most certainly be enjoyed throughout this election season and beyond.
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By Jared TJanuary 10, 2011
*Updates in comments 7, 11, 25, 27, 30 and 32. Also, in the Signature Books section I’ve added anticipated release dates for forthcoming publications provided by the publisher.*
Last year I put together, with help from a number of publishers, booksellers, and friends, a list of forthcoming and recently published books on Mormon history. Most of those books highlighted last year have indeed found a place on bookshelves, so it?s about time to do it again. There are some exciting books that have recently come off the press and which are still forthcoming. Ben did a good job last week of mentioning some highlights from recent publications, so I’m going a bit light on the “recently published” aspect of this list. Generally speaking, the books that were on last years list and have been published I will not list here. As always, I?m sure I missed some titles, so if you know of others or have heard rumors of other forthcoming books/projects, please leave a comment and I?ll add it to the list.
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By David G.August 20, 2017
This is the twelfth entry in the Third Annual Summer Book Club at Juvenile Instructor. This year we are reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich?s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women?s Rights in Early Mormonism (Knopf, 2017). Check back every Sunday for the week?s installment! Please follow the book club and JI on Facebook.
Chapter 12, ?we now must look after the poor,? examines the intersectionality of the reemergence of the Relief Society in the 1850s. The chapter raises intriguing questions regarding gender, class, race, and settler colonialism in the Great Basin. How did gendered assumptions regarding medicine and health care shape female organization in the early 1850s? How did gendered assumptions shape how Latter-day Saints provided for the poor? How did female initiative interplay with male priesthood authority? How did racial and gendered views of Native peoples shape the formation of at first independent, and then church-sponsored, relief societies? What role did (white) women play in the development of Mormon settler colonialism, and how did clothing function as a marker between ?civilization? and ?savagery?? Ulrich answers all of these questions with her trademark engaging prose, rooting what other scholars might have treated in highly theoretical and abstract terms in the highly personal experiences and writings of Patty Sessions, Amanda Barnes Smith, Eliza R. Snow, as well as missionaries such as Thomas Brown.
Ulrich begins with the Council of Health, a mixed-gender organization of doctors and midwives that began meeting in 1849. Concerned that the presence of male doctors was discouraging many women from attending the meetings, women such as Phoebe Angel and Patty Sessions created the Female Council, which as the name implies was for women only. Using Sessions?s diary, Ulrich explores the ?system of cooperative care? that focused ?on female responsibility for women?s and children?s bodies. Recognizing that poverty or lack of help in the home sometimes made recovery from illness impossible, the Female Council began to act more and more in the spirit of the Nauvoo Relief Society, collecting funds for the poor, and carrying medicines and food to those they knew were in need? (295). Meetings of the Female Council also served as sites for female spiritual expression, with healing blessings and glossolalia. Ulrich profitably combines sympathetic sources with the more critical account by non-Mormon Elizabeth Ferris, a source highlighted by the JI?s J. Stapley a few years ago.
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By Tona HJanuary 13, 2014
Or: All Web is Not Created Equal, have you noticed?
One of the sessions I attended at the AHA this month was Session 151, Social Media and History. It featured one of our JIers, Max Mueller, talking about tensions and complications in the church’s “I am a Mormon” campaign, including the fascinating case of one woman whose tattoos were airbrushed out of her profile pic (her profile is now gone, for other reasons). Great talk, by the way, along with several others that reflected on the ethical and methodological problems of using social media as historical sources for researching marginalized groups or threatened voices. In each of the presentations — Max’s on constructing Mormon online “diversity,” Jessica Lingel’s on underground music scenes, Sadaf Jaffer’s on online discussion boards for Pakistani atheists, and Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa’s on sites made by and about Tibetans — the very existence of the sites to begin with, and especially their continued life on the web, is inherently unstable. It was actually a rather terrifying session, like watching 4 canaries in a coal mine (Hey! There’s a pocket of air over here! Oh wait, never mind).
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By AmandaJuly 17, 2013
Recently, two biographies were published on Elijah Abel/Ables, a black Mormon man who held the priesthood in the nineteenth century with the blessing of Joseph Smith and many of his contemporaries. Rather than attempt a traditional review, I decided to write a conversations post with Russell Stevenson, the author of one of the two biographies. Stevenson is an independent scholar with a master?s degree in history from the University of Kentucky. He recently self-published Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables.
In order to make the post easier to read, I have arranged the questions I asked and Stevenson?s responses into categories.
General Questions
The Spelling of Abel?s Name
Amanda: In your book, you use a spelling of Elijah Abel’s name that many readers will be unfamiliar with. Where does it come from? Why did you decide to go with that spelling?
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By Ben PNovember 14, 2012
As Patrick Mason rightly noted in his guest post on Friday, “the Mormon moment was good for Mormon studies”–even if it had, by now, worn out its welcome. Perhaps the most obvious result of the past two years was a deluge of columns, op-eds, essays, and articles designed to explain Mormonism to a curious audience. And by “deluge,” I mean “holy-crap-there-are-tons-of-new-stuff-ever-week-to-the-point-that-they-all-mesh-together.” So in attempt to make sure they don’t all fade from memory, this post tries to, with the help of friends, list some of my favorites. (I’m sure I’ve forgotten many–that’s where you come in handy: if you suggest something I find very important, I’ll even add it to the list.) If I had more time/interest, I would try to outline some of the major lessons and offer a general narrative arc of where the “moment” went over the past two years, but I’ll save that for someone else.
Below, you will find the author, title, venue, date, summary, and brief excerpt from what I remember to be the “best” of the Mormon moment coverage. Please add any that I missed in the comments, as well as take issue with/challenge some of my selections.
(And to the future historian who was looking for sources when anaylizing this “Mormon moment”: you’re welcome.)
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By Ben PMay 1, 2012
If you are a fan of the combustible blend of religion and politics that has played a large role in American history, then today is your Christmas. Religion & Politics, an online journal run by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, was launched this morning with a plethora of fascinating and sophisticated content. General information about the journal can be found here, and you can see that it boasts an impressive and wide-ranging staff and board. Our own Max Mueller serves as the associate editor, so we at JI like to claim a personal connection with the project.
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