JI Summer Book Club: On Zion’s Mount, Ch. 2.

This is the second installment in the JI’s fourth annual summer book club. This year we are reading Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2008). Check back every Thursday for the week’s installment! Please follow the JI on Facebook and Twitter!

Several years ago, I worked as a TA for a class on Mormonism and the American Experience. Towards the end of the course, the professor dedicated a week for reading excerpts from recent, groundbreaking scholarship—in contrast to the classic historiography which had largely dominated the class. My assignment was to survey several books to recommend possible excerpts for an undergraduate class. When I came to On Zion’s Mount, one of the chapters I recommended was chapter two, “Brigham Young and the Famine of the Fish-Eaters.” Now, nearly ten years later, I was eager to see if my earlier enthusiasm for this chapter was justified. I am happy to report that if anything I am more enthralled with Farmer’s research, methods, and conclusions now than I was as a TA.

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George Q. Cannon on Brigham Young

This post in our ongoing series on the George Q. Cannon diaries, which are now published on the Church Historian’s Press website, comes from Matthew J. Grow, director of publications at the Church History Library.

I’m grateful that Juvenile Instructor is spotlighting the George Q. Cannon journal. Those of us who have worked on the Cannon journal at the Church History Department are excited that the journal is now available to all who would like to read it and use it in their own research and writing.

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From the Archives: Black Internationalism in 19th Century Salt Lake City; or a Haitian-born African American in Utah Reports on the Fourth of July, 1873

NOTE: The original version of this post was based, in part, on faulty research, for which I take full blame. What appears below is a revised version (with a slightly modified title).  There is no documentation identifying either Francis or Martha Grice as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Believing, however, that the source shared below is still sufficiently interesting and important, I’m keeping the post. A copy of the original can be seen here. 

I’ve been slowly making my way through Paul Ortiz’s new book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States. In a chapter on the Cuban Solidarity Movement of the 1860s through the 1890s, Ortiz quotes an 1873 letter from “an African American in Salt Lake City,” published in the black-owned newspaper, The Elevator.[1] Curious to learn more (and anxious to see if there were any clues where the SLC correspondent was a Latter-day Saint), I searched for the original letter in the digitized version of the paper (courtesy of the California Digital Newspaper Collection), and to my great delight, discovered that it was written by Francis H. Grice, a “mulatto” artist, miner, and restauranteur who moved to Salt Lake City in 1871.[2] 

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Tolkien, Mormonism, and Pendle Hill

During the first LDS mission to England, Heber C. Kimball and Joseph Fielding ventured up the Ribble Valley (I post links to the Google maps since they are too grainy when I copy them; minimize the search bar to see the whole area) after their tremendous success in Preston (Pendle Hill is the green blob north of Manchester with the word “Nelson” on it). Their success continued especially at Chatburn (at the top of the first map) where townsfolk requested that Kimball preach to them and where Kimball ended up baptizing twenty-five people the night of his first visit.[1] Kimball later said, “My hair would rise on my head as I walked through the streets, and I did not know then what was the matter with me. I pulled off my hat, and felt that I wanted to pull off my shoes, and I did not know what to think of it.” When Kimball told Joseph Smith of this experience, Smith replied, “Did you not understand it? That is a place where some of the old Prophets traveled and dedicated that land, and their blessing rested upon you.”[2]

Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England

Looming above Chatburn is Pendle Hill, which does have a very interesting religious history. In 1652, George Fox felt impressed to climb Pendle Hill: “There atop the hill,” said Fox, “I was moved to sound the day of the Lord; and the Lord let me see atop of the hill in what places he had a great people to be gathered.”[3] Quakers mark that event as the beginning of the movement.

On the other side of the hill is the Pendle Forest (not really a forest; that meant a traditional hunting ground where in the Middle Ages people weren’t supposed to live) the events that led to England’s most famous witch trial occurred. Witches are a major part of the tourist industry of the region. The region was also the most Catholic area in England after the Reformation. That plus the abundance of Methodist churches in the area makes the Pendle Hill region sort of the overflowing microcosm of all the factors that led to early Mormon conversion according to my research. [4]

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George Q. Cannon and the Gilded Age

This post in our ongoing series on the George Q. Cannon diaries, which are now published on the Church Historian’s Press website, comes from Jed Woodworth. Jed currently works at the Church History Library.

The quarter century between the end of Reconstruction and the U.S. presidency of Theodore Roosevelt stands out as a great anomaly. As John Pettegrew has observed, it is the only periodization in American history with a pejorative title. Other periods have been given benign or complementary monikers like “Early National America” or the “Progressive Era.” Not so with the Gilded Age. That historians adopted the name of the satirical 1873 novel written by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain speaks to the problematic character of this period. Excess, tawdriness, and corruption have come to define this time.

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The value to historians of the now-complete online journal of George Q. Cannon

This post in our ongoing series on the George Q. Cannon diaries, which are now published on the Church Historian’s Press website, comes from Richard Rust. Richard, who was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assisted in the work of the George Q. Cannon journals.

As is noted on the website of The Journal of George Q. Cannon,

next to Brigham Young, George Q. Cannon was arguably the best-known Latter-day Saint in the last half of the nineteenth century. His record covers half a century, a period in which he served as an editor and publisher, a businessman, an educator, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a territorial delegate in Congress, and a counselor to church presidents Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow.

The vast majority of Cannon’s journal has never been publicly available before. The online publication of Cannon’s journal includes roughly 2.5 million words and opens up new insight and understanding into the Mormon past. The journal, however, should not be seen just from the vantage point of Mormon history—it ranks as one of the most voluminous and valuable journals in American religious history. Cannon’s broad interests, extensive connections with people both within and outside of the Latter-day Saint faith, and cogent observations will also make his journal of particular interest to scholars and students of western U.S. history and U.S. political history. With journal entries covering the mundane to the miraculous, the interactions of his large family to the dynamics of Congress, and his private religious practices to his leadership in a variety of ecclesiastical settings, Cannon’s record deserves deep study.

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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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