Succession in the LDS Presidency: Past and Present

President Thomas S. Monson, sixteenth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away last night surrounded by family in his Salt Lake City home from effects related to aging. We share our sympathy and support for his family and all those affected by his death, notably sixteen million or so Latter-day Saints.

There will be time for historical retrospectives at a later date. At this time, I thought it would be helpful to review how an LDS Church President is called and sustained by the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. This section is taken from the Mormon newsroom, I would encourage you to read the rest here. At the bottom of this post, I’ll share some helpful links on the historical development of succession in the LDS Church.

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Happy New Year! Here Are a Few Things We Are Going to do This Year

Happy New Year from all of us at Juvenile Instructor! We enjoyed bringing you historical argument, book reviews, announcements, and our summer book club in 2017. We have several more exciting plans for 2018.

• New authors with historiographical expertise in areas we have neglected
• Roundtables on new books in Mormon history (including J. Stapley’s and Colleen McDannell’s new books)
• A series of posts on beginning to write a dissertation
• A series of posts on turning dissertations into books
• Q&As with scholars that teach Mormon history, from that that identify as Mormon historians and those that do not
• A March Madness-style bracket on the best articles in Mormon history

Be sure to follow us on social media or via email for updates! Following us on social media helps other to find us and helps us spread the word of news and notes from the world of Mormon history.

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SUMMER BOOK CLUB

Postdoc at the University of Virginia

2018-2019 Postdoctoral Fellowship

We invite applications from those whose work bears on American religious history, thought or practice and, ideally, in relation to law and politics. Preference will be given to applicants with interest in marginal religious movements, especially Mormonism.

The University of Virginia?s Religious Studies Department invites applications for one full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer for the 2018-2019 academic year. The anticipated start date is July 25, 2018. Applications are welcome from any whose work bears on American religious history, thought or practice. Preference will be given to those applicants with interest in marginal or newer religious movements, especially Mormonism. Preference will be given to applicants interested in adding Mormon Studies to their portfolio. Expertise in Mormonism is not required. Rather, the Fellowship is designed to provide training for persons who wish to add such expertise to an existing disciplinary specialty.

Duties include, but are not limited to, teaching three courses over the two-semester term of the fellowship. Specifically, the Fellow will teach two seminars in his or her discipline and on topics of his or her choice. In addition, the Fellow will team-teach, with the Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies, an introductory survey on Mormonism in relation to American culture. Applicants should evidence experience in and commitment to undergraduate and graduate teaching in a liberal arts framework, and be prepared to participate in both a large team-taught introductory-level class and smaller upper-level courses.

Additional duties include assistance with UVA?s Forum on Religion and American Democracy. The Forum sponsors interdisciplinary research and other academic and public activity on the ways American religion and democracy shape one another. It also includes study of how the evolving relationship between American religion and democracy have affected, and continue to affect, other nations.

Compensation for this appointment will be in the form of a competitive salary with full-time benefits and includes a $3,000 research fund. For full consideration apply by February 15, 2018; however, the position will remain open until filled.

Applicants for the fellowship must have attained their PhD by the appointment start date.

To apply, please complete a Candidate Profile online through Jobs@UVA (search on posting 0622269), and electronically attach the following: a cover letter, a current CV including the names and contact information for three references, and a statement describing, in no more than 300 words, your qualifications for and philosophy of teaching with attention to your disciplinary approach.

Questions regarding the position should be directed to Kathleen Flake, Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies: kathleen.flake@virginia.edu.

Questions regarding the application process or Jobs@UVA should be directed to Mick Watson, Administrator, Department of Religious Studies: maw4fp@virginia.edu.

The University will perform background checks on all new faculty hires prior to making a final offer of employment.

The University of Virginia is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women, minorities, veterans and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

MHA International Scholars Fund

The Mormon History Association (MHA) seeks to raise $5,000 to support scholars from outside the United States to travel to and participate in the Association’s annual conference in Boise, Idaho, on June 7-10, 2018.  If you love Mormon history, this is an excellent opportunity to support the diversification and internationalization of our community of scholars! LINK HERE

MHA is making a concerted effort to diversify its membership and include scholars and students from around the globe in order to help expand our understanding of Mormon history outside of the United States.  An annual fund of $5,000 will allow the association to subsidize the attendance and participation of scholars from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere, for whom the expense of traveling to the United States for an MHA conference is often prohibitive.  We need the perspectives and knowledge these scholars can contribute, and ask for your help in elevating their voices.

The Mormon History Association is the preeminent scholarly organization dedicated to the study and understanding of all aspects of the Mormon past.  As an independent, nondenominational, nonprofit organization, we welcome all who are interested in Mormon history.  MHA’s flagship event is our annual conference, scheduled to occur next on June 7-10, 2018, in Boise, Idaho.

Please join us in this initiative to bring a greater international presence to the MHA 2018 conference. Contributions of every level are welcome.  All donations are tax deductible.  Our goal is to raise $5,000 by January 22.

Thank you for your support of the Mormon History Association and our increasingly global community of scholars and members!

DONATE HERE

Mormonism in The Moslem Sunrise, 1922

In 1921, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, a representative of the Ahmadiyya Movement and the first Muslim missionary to America, launched the The Moslem Sunrise, a newspaper intended to help proselytize Americans. In its October 6, 1922 issue, Sudiq included a short excerpt from another paper on “Mormon Christians.” Here it is in its entirety:

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Guest Post: Introducing Foundational Texts of Mormonism (OUP, 2018)

The following is a guest post from friend-of-the-JI Mark Ashurst-McGee, the Senior Research and Review Historian at the Joseph Smith Papers and co-editor of several volumes in the series. He holds degrees in American History from Arizona State University, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University. Ashurst-McGee has authored award-winning graduate theses on Joseph Smith’s Zion project and the Mormon prophet’s use of seer stones and he is the author of several articles. He is the co-editor, along with Robin Scott Jensen and Sharalyn D. Howcroft, of Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources, forthcoming in February 2018 from Oxford University Press.

Early next year, Oxford University Press will publish a major new book on Joseph Smith and early Mormonism. If you are a scholar or an avid reader of early Mormon history, you will want to own and read this compilation.

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Highlights from Mormon Studies Review, Volume 5

The Mormon Studies Review is the best annual over view of the Mormon Studies (sub)field available anywhere. Produced by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the journal is produced by a remarkable editorial team. You can subscribe for $10 (and you get the Maxwell Institute’s other publications, too!). I’ll highlight each contribution, and pull a sentence or two from each article to give a taste of the writing and rigor involved in each contribution. As much as the summaries, I hope that you’ll appreciate with me the myriad of approaches that could be used in Mormon History or Mormon Studies. The field, as they say, is white and ready to harvest.

First, a review panel comprised of Ann Little (a renowned women’s history specialist and microhistorian), Paul Reeve (the Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah), and Sarah Carter (a historian of plural marriage outside of Mormonism) examines Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females.[i]  An excerpt from Little’s response sums up the book well:

Ulrich’s instinct to hew to the daily realities of mid-nineteenth-century missionary life and westward imperial expansion serves her well. The Mormons she portrays lead complicated lives, emotionally and sexually messy as well as frequently (literally) clogged with mud, dirt, and dysentery from their various removes and migrations. She focuses on the details of early Mormon life as they were revealed in diaries rather than retrospective memoirs, which brings the immediacy of their experimentation to life.

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Mormon Immigrants and Fugitive Slaves on the (Underground) Railroad

The July 19, 1856 issue of the Provincial Freeman and Weekly Advertiser, an abolitionist newspaper published in Chatham, Canada West (modern-day Ontario) carried the following notice from Albany, New York:

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REVIEW: The Field is White: Harvest in the Three Counties of England

Carol Wilkinson and Cynthia Doxey Green, The Field is White: Harvest in Three Counties of England (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2017).

As a child, we had a record that narrated the story of Wilford Woodruff as a missionary at Benbow farm. (Vinyl played on our old blue Fischer Price record player. I only remember Woodruff and the headless horseman though I?m sure there were more options). The dramatic narration detailed a miraculous mass conversion of a whole sect by LDS apostle Woodruff in 1840 England.  Though fascinating that any American child might know of a pond on an obscure farm in the middle of the English countryside, the fame of Benbow Farm is well known among many Mormons. Lds.org lists scores of articles and talks focused on the same narrative. There Wilford Woodruff baptized a whole congregation of United Brethren?six hundred strong. The story has been retold and retold; Woodruff is legendary. As the story goes the United Brethren were just waiting for the Mormon missionaries to show up. John Benbow said they were ?searching for light and truth, but had gone as far as they could, and were continually calling upon the Lord to open the way before them and send them light and knowledge that they might know the true way to be saved.? Woodruff brought them the ?light and truth? for which they searched and they converted in droves in Benbow’s pond. 

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2017 in Retrospect: An Overview of Recent Books and Articles in Mormon History

Once again, this is my attempt to recap the historiography of Mormonism from the past twelve months. This is the eighth such post, and previous installments are found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I do not list every single book and article from 2016, but I do highlight those I found most interesting and relevant. Therefore, a strong bias is obviously involved, so I hope you?ll add more in the comments.

The Instant Classic

• Laurel Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women?s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (Knopf).
• Ann M. Little, W. Paul Reeve, and Sarah Carter, review panel on Laurel Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, in Mormon Studies Review 5, 1-16.

Readers of this blog should already be familiar with Ulrich’s new book. (And hopefully everyone has already read our summer book club devoted to the masterpiece.) If you’re interested in my take, my review is found in Dialogue. In short: it’s perhaps the most significant book in Mormon studies since Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, and perhaps surpasses even that. Make sure to read the roundtable devoted to Ulrich in the most recent issue of Mormon Studies Review; and while you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the field’s best review journal.

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