By August 17, 2015
Sara M. Patterson (Hanover College) is conducting research on people’s trek experiences for a larger project on historical memory along the Mormon Trail. She invites people who have participated in trekking to fill out this short survey about their experiences: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KWVVKJR
If you have any questions, you can contact her at: patterson@hanover.edu
By August 12, 2015
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Race, Gender, and Power in the Mormon Borderlands
Mormon history lies at the borders between subaltern and dominant cultures. On the one hand, due to their unusual family structure and theocratic government, Mormons were a persecuted minority for the better part of the nineteenth century. On the other, Mormons played a significant role as colonizers of the North American West, extending their reach to the borderlands of Mexico, Canada, and the Pacific Islands. There Mormon colonists intermarried with Native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians and Samoans, even as they placed exclusions on interracial sexual relations and marriage. During the nineteenth century, Mormons also discouraged Native peoples? polygamous practices while encouraging plural marriage for white women. And Mormon religious doctrine subordinated persons of color within church hierarchy well into the twentieth century. African-American men, for example, could not hold the priesthood until 1978. Historically, then, Mormons have navigated multiple borders– between colonizer and colonized, between white and Other, and between minority and imperial identities. This limnal position calls for further investigation. We propose an anthology of essays on race, gender, and power in the Mormon borderlands.
Over the past thirty years, historians of Mormon women have expanded our understanding of gender and power in Mormon society. However, most of these studies focus on white Mormon women, while Mormon women of color have remained largely invisible. This volume seeks not simply to make visible the lived experiences of Mormon women of color, but more importantly, to explore gender and race in the Mormon borderlands. Taken together, these essays will address how Mormon women and men navigated the complications of minority and colonizer status, interracial marriage and doctrinal race hierarchies, patriarchy and female agency, violence and religious responsibility, and plural identities. These metaphoric borders were brought into play on the geographic and cultural borders of the United States. Specifically, this volume will encompass the continental U.S. West, the borderlands of Canada and Mexico, and Pacific Rim islands such as Samoa and Hawaii, exploring the intersectionality of race and gender in Mormon cultures on the borders from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. This focus will open new directions in Mormon history in concert with recent trends in western history. The anthology will have full scholarly apparatus and we welcome both historical research and interdisciplinary work.
Please submit article proposals/manuscript drafts by Sept.15, 2015, to Dee Garceau at <garceau@rhodes.edu> (901-484-1837)
Co-Editors: Dee Garceau, Rhodes College garceau@rhodes.edu ; Sujey Vega, Arizona State University, Sujey.Vega@asu.edu; Andrea Radke-Moss, BYU-Idaho radkea@byui.edu
Co-Editors’ Faculty Profiles:
Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.
By August 11, 2015
Black, White, and Mormon: A Conference on the Evolving Status of Black Saints within the Mormon Fold
October 8-9, 2015
In December 2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a new essay on Race and the Priesthood on its Gospel Topics page at LDS.org. The statement was the strongest to date in distancing the LDS Church from its prior teachings on the status of black people within Mormon theology. This conference seeks to offer a multi-disciplinary assessment of that status across time and space. It seeks to explore the historical evolution of race based priesthood and temple bans, the historical roots of segregation in America and how it impacts Mormonism, the expansion of Mormonism into inner-city locations in the United States as well as the impact of race on Mormonism’s international reach. It will also consider the intersections between race and Mormon women, notions of social justice within Mormonism, the implications of race upon educational opportunities at LDS universities, and a discussion of how race plays out at the ward level. In short, this conference will talk about race and Mormonism as it seeks greater understanding and higher purpose.
By August 10, 2015
We concluded the inaugural JI Summer Book Club last week. The author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman, kindly agreed to reflect on the writing of RSR, its reception, and what he would change if he were to write the book again. His response is below.
I am pleased to know your group is working away at RSR. I am sure you will find many questions worth exploring. In my opinion you are preparing for the future. Sometime down the line another biography will be written, and your inquiries are finding the spaces where there is more to say and another perspective to be presented.
By August 9, 2015
A number of scholars have argued for a connection between Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the commencement of his treasure-digging activities, a trend nicely summarized by Mark Ashurst-McGee in his seminal work on Joseph Smith’s seer stones:
When Joseph went to the grove he was not just wavering between Presbyterianism and Methodism, but between organized religion and folk magic. Should he join one particular denomination or were they all wrong together? Should he convert to Evangelicalism or obtain his seer stone? “Go thy way,” the Lord told him, and rejected the churches of the day in part because, as he told Joseph, they taught “the commandments of men, having a form of Godliness but they deny the power thereof.” As historian Marvin Hill notes, the power and gifts of God were not denied by the treasure seers and diggers and other practitioners of folk magic. Richard Bushman explains that the First Vision would have driven Joseph away from the organized churches in his mother’s social orbit toward the treasuring-seeking culture of his father.
Ashusrt-McGee goes so far as to ask, “Did Jesus instruct Joseph to obtain a stone?”[1]
By August 7, 2015
Join the project!
I wanted to make a quick public notice of a new project at the Juvenile Instructor. We have begun the process of mapping every initialism/pseudonym in the issues of the Woman’s Exponent to their respective authors. This process is time intensive and will require a lot of work, but we figure opening the resource (a Google Doc at this point) to the public and our readership will encourage collaboration. Ultimately, this list will prove useful to many scholars as they study the lives of the women who crafted this publication and the world they shaped.
By August 5, 2015
The release of the photos of Joseph Smith?s seer stone as well as the pouch made by Emma Smith that protected it, illustrates the sheer viscerality of material religion. It demonstrates the power that objects can have in the lives of religious believers and is a great example of how religion is not just something that is believed or felt abstractly or read through a text. Objects and bodies mediate religious experience.
By August 4, 2015
Wanna know what Joseph Smith’s seer stone looks like? BEHOLD:
Picture of Joseph Smith’s seer stone, found in “Joseph The Seer,” https://www.lds.org/ensign/2015/10/joseph-the-seer?lang=eng.
Minutes ago, coinciding with a Joseph Smith Papers Project press conference announcing the publication of Revelations and Translations Volume 3, Parts 1 & 2, the Church’s website for their flagship magazine, The Ensign, posted an essay that will appear in the October issue. This essay, titled “Joseph The Seer,” was written by Richard Turley, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and our very own Robin Jensen. It discusses the translation of the Book of Mormon and gives a very candid and frank account of Joseph Smith’s usage of a seer stone. It also includes the picture above.
So, this is probably a big deal. Again, you can read the essay here. I’ll update with quotes an other relevant information as it becomes available.
UPDATE:
Here are a few choice quotes from the essay, which I again encourage everyone to read:
?Seeing? and ?seers? were part of the American and family culture in which Joseph Smith grew up. Steeped in the language of the Bible and a mixture of Anglo-European cultures brought over by immigrants to North America, some people in the early 19th century believed it was possible for gifted individuals to ?see,? or receive spiritual manifestations, through material objects such as seer stones.
The young Joseph Smith accepted such familiar folk ways of his day, including the idea of using seer stones to view lost or hidden objects. Since the biblical narrative showed God using physical objects to focus people?s faith or communicate spiritually in ancient times, Joseph and others assumed the same for their day. Joseph?s parents, Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, affirmed the family?s immersion in this culture and their use of physical objects in this way, and the villagers of Palmyra and Manchester, New York, where the Smiths lived, sought out Joseph to find lost objects before he moved to Pennsylvania in late 1827.
And:
In later years, as Joseph told his remarkable story, he emphasized his visions and other spiritual experiences. Some of his former associates focused on his early use of seer stones in an effort to destroy his reputation in a world that increasingly rejected such practices. In their proselyting efforts, Joseph and other early members chose not to focus on the influence of folk culture, as many prospective converts were experiencing a transformation in how they understood religion in the Age of Reason. In what became canonized revelations, however, Joseph continued to teach that seer stones and other seeric devices, as well as the ability to work with them, were important and sacred gifts from God.
And:
In fact, historical evidence shows that in addition to the two seer stones known as ?interpreters,? Joseph Smith used at least one other seer stone in translating the Book of Mormon, often placing it into a hat in order to block out light. According to Joseph?s contemporaries, he did this in order to better view the words on the stone.
By 1833, Joseph Smith and his associates began using the biblical term ?Urim and Thummim? to refer to any stones used to receive divine revelations, including both the Nephite interpreters and the single seer stone. This imprecise terminology has complicated attempts to reconstruct the exact method by which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. In addition to using the interpreters, according to Martin Harris, Joseph also used one of his seer stones for convenience during the Book of Mormon translation. Other sources corroborate Joseph?s changing translation instruments.
By August 3, 2015
This is the twelfth and final installment of the first annual JI Summer Book Club. This year we are reading Richard Bushman?s landmark biography of Mormonism?s founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). JI bloggers have covered small chunks of the book in successive weeks through the summer, with new posts appearing Monday mornings. We invite anyone and everyone interested to read along and to use the comment sections on each post to share your own reflections and questions. There are discussion questions below.
Installments:
This fall Journals, Volume 3, of the Joseph Smith Papers will be released. This is the last of Joseph Smith?s journals and covers the end of his life. It will be noted for its generous use of the Nauvoo Council of Fifty record books, a document of near mythological character (though soon to be banalized by availability). In the case of the Council of Fifty, the record may be the only significant new document to expand on Bushman?s overall project to become available since publication. J3 also includes the most frank disclosures about the Nauvoo Temple liturgy to be published by the LDS Church in more than a century. I thought about this as I read through the final chapters of Bushman?s biography of Joseph Smith. It is the two associated ideas: theocracy and temple cosmology that saturate Smith?s final six months.
Bushman?s cool narration of 1844 flushes out the players and issues that culminate in the bloody death of Joseph Smith alongside his brother. We see the storm rise over the parched landscape, the lightning strike, and then the fields burn. It is hard to imagine any other conclusion to these months. Bushman carefully corrects the narrative of its most hyperbolic hagiographic conceits while appearing to simply narrate the events as they happen.
By August 2, 2015
At a recent meeting of the JI permabloggers which coincided with the MHA meeting in early June, we decided to move our Mormon Studies roundup from weekly to monthly. 
The feature will now appear on the first Sunday of the month. However, the roundup then promptly took a holiday in July, so apologies for the unintentionally long stretch from the last MS roundup to this one. After such a fast, we are back with a veritable feast of Mormon history-related news and events.
© 2026 – Juvenile Instructor
Recent Comments
Glen Larson on CFP: Book of Mormon: “Please add me to your mailing list. Thanks”
Mark Staker on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “Jenny was always generous in sharing her knowledge. She was not only an exceptional educator (who also taught her colleagues along the way), but she…”
Gary Bergera on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “Jenny's great. Thanks for posting this.”
Kathy Cardon on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “I worked in the Church's Historical department when Jenny was in the Museum. I always enjoyed our interactions. Reading this article has been a real…”
Don Tate on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “Very well done and richly deserved! I am most proud of Jenny and how far she has come with her life, her scholarship, and her…”
Ben P on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “My favorite former boss and respected current historian!”