Scholarly Inquiry: W. Paul Reeve, A Century of Black Mormons Project

W. Paul Reeve is Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah. He directs the digital history project “Century of Black Mormons.”

This weekend the University will sponsor “Black, White and Mormon II,” the second conference on race in the modern LDS Church the University’s Mormon Studies initiative has sponsored.  We approached Reeve with a number of questions about the “Century of Black Mormons” project.

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JI Summer Book Club: On Zion’s Mount, Ch. 1

The trick of successful religious and cultural movements is situating ephemeral presence and evolving relation in timelessness. This is equally true for Mormon and Native American identity. The trick for scholars of religious and cultural movements is to simultaneously respect that timelessness and complicate it. Farmer is a successful scholar, and in Chapter 1 of On Zion’s Mount frames both Mormons and Native Americans in the Great Basin by their physical place in the world—literally the space on this planet.

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Announcement: George Q. Cannon Journals Blog Series

In 1849, George Q. Cannon began his first known journal documenting his journey to the California gold mines. Fifty years later, his last known journal recounts his final trip to California in hopes of finding a healthier climate. The intervening journals—for a combined total of 52 notebooks, blank books, typescripts, and published day planners—offer an extensive (some might say overwhelming) record of this prominent leader of the LDS Church. This morning, the Church Historian’s Press published the final installment of the Cannon journals, offering a tremendous source for nineteenth-century Mormon history from one of its most influential members and leaders. (Website here and e-book here)

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Review: Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources

Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft, eds. Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Most historiographical essays on recent shifts in Mormon Studies point to new subjects of study or new theoretical frameworks that build on, depart from, and challenge earlier generations of scholarship. In Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources, editors Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft have compiled a set of original essays that encourage scholars to return to the archival and documentary roots of the earlier historiography. But instead of simply mining those records for content, the editors invite students and scholars of Mormonism to “interrogat[e] documents as products of history rather than just as sources of historical information.” Historians, they insist, should take a nod from “archivists, descriptive bibliographers, and documentary editors” and ask “routine methodological questions of textual interpretation, production, transmission, and reception” (2). Their call here builds on both their own training and the Joseph Smith Papers Project that employs each.[1] The goal of the volume isn’t simply to tell historians what to do, but rather to demonstrate what more sustained attention to the production, transmission, reception, and custodianship of the documentary record can illuminate about early Mormonism.

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A Rather Disappointing Sequel to the “Great Hawaiian Cat Massacre”

Regular readers of JI may remember a post that I wrote a few years ago about Joseph F. Smith’s beheading of a cat.

It was a fun post to write and remains one of my favorite posts that I wrote during my time at JI. I recently discovered, however, that Joseph F.’s hatred of cats may have been a family trait.

I am currently researching the life and thought of Ina Coolbrith, who was a first cousin of Joseph F. Smith and California’s first poet laureate. She hid her connection to the Mormon community as an adult but was a frequent correspondent with the Smith family. One newspaper even suggested that Joseph F. Smith may have proposed marriage to her.

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JI Summer Book Club: Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount

Back by popular demand, the Juvenile Instructor will be hosting its Fourth Annual Summer Book Club in 2018! This year’s book is Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2008).[1] The selection of Farmer’s book continues our ongoing emphasis on biography. The first two years, we read and discussed Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling and then Newell and Avery’s Mormon Enigma, biographies of Mormonism’s founding couple. Last year, we read Ulrich’s A House Full of Females, a group biography of several women (and a few men) of the movement’s first generation. On Zion’s Mount is perhaps best understood as the biography of a place—Mount Timpanogos—and how it became such a prominent landmark in Utah.

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News from Church Historian’s Press

For those not paying close attention, a fairly important milestone might go unnoticed at the Church Historian’s Press website. The church just announced that last year’s volume, At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, is now available in Spanish and Portuguese on the Church Historian’s Press website. Later this week the translated volume will also appear in the Gospel Library app. Having published numerous books, this is the first volume from the Church Historian’s Press in a language other than English. Given the international growth in the latter half of the twentieth century—particularly in the Southern Hemisphere—this is a crucial step in reaching members and scholars outside the English-reading wards, branches, and universities.

MWHIT Women’s History Scholarships

The Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team is proud to announce two scholarships dedicated to the study of Mormon women’s history, one for independent scholars, and one for students at an accredited institution. Applications are due 30 June 2018

MWHIT promotes research and networking in the field of Mormon Women’s History. They hold public events to promote new publications and projects and host a women’s history breakfast at the annual Mormon History Association Conference. Check out their website and join their Facebook groups: Mormon Women’s History Initiative and I Love Mormon Women’s History.

Book Review: Hokulani K. Aikau’s A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai‘i

Hokulani K. Aikau’s book, A Chosen People, A Promised Land, published in 2012, is an important work on Mormonism in the Pacific, addressing the colonial legacy of the church and its racial ideologies. Back in 2013 here on this blog, Aikau’s work was listed as an important work in Mormon history and the history of indigenous peoples. But the Juvenile Instructor blog has never had a full review of Aikau’s book published. In order to fix this error, this post includes a portion of my review of Aikau’s book that was just published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History. 

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Black, White, and Mormon II Conference

Black, White, and Mormon II:

A Conference on Race in the LDS Church Since the 1978 Revelation

• June 29-30, 2018
• Salt Lake City Library, Nancy Tessman Auditorium

On 8 June 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Spencer W. Kimball’s revelation extending the lay priesthood to “all worthy male members… without regard for race or color.” To mark this event and analyze the Mormon Church’s ongoing efforts to achieve racial equality, the Tanner Humanities Center will host a multidisciplinary conference in collaboration with the College of Humanities’ Simmons Mormon Studies Professor Paul Reeve. This follows their 2015 conference on Mormonism and race that received national and international press coverage.

This conference will include scholarly and community panels to examine themes and issues about how the LDS Church sustains an ever-increasing multiracial and multicultural membership and the impact of doctrinal change at the grassroots.

Speakers include Darius Gray, Alice Burch, Ahmad Corbitt, Wain Myers, and LeShawn Williams, among many others, with a cultural celebration with Marj Desuis.

This conference is sponsored by the Charles Redd Center, BYU; LDS Church History Department; Gregory Prince; Smith-Petit Foundation; W. Paul Reeve, Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies, University of Utah; Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah, and Jon and Philip Lear.

More information and a complete schedule can be found here.https://thc.utah.edu/lectures-programs/mormon-studies-initiative/black-white-mormon.php