By Tona HJune 22, 2015
This is the seventh 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 will be covering 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:
? Part 1: Prologue, Chapters 1-2
? Part 2: Chapters 3-4
? Part 3: Chapters 5-6
? Part 4: Chapters 7-9
? Part 5: Chapters 10-12
? Part 6: Chapters 13-15
? Next week (Part 8): Chapters 19-21
Sparse comments last week suggest some understandable mid-book fatigue (it IS hefty, after all, and it IS the busy part of the summer for most of us), but never fear ? just jump right back in. Chapters 16-18 form, in many ways, the emotional heart of Bushman?s biography and a microcosm of the thorny problems inherent in writing a finely textured history of a figure as iconic and enigmatic as Joseph Smith. They are Rough Stone Rolling itself, writ small.
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By J StuartJune 17, 2015
JI recently finished a roundtable review on Paul Reeve’s wonderful Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press: 2015). Dr. Reeve has kindly consented to respond to the roundtable–his thoughts are found below.
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By AmandaJune 16, 2015
I am currently working on a mapping project at the University of Michigan focused on sexual crime in nineteenth-century Utah. Every day, I look through the index of the Third District Court Criminal Case files. The cases included in the index (which is available through ancestry.com) covers the years, 1882 – 1916. I still have a long ways to go with the project, but I thought I would share some preliminary thoughts.
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By J StuartJune 15, 2015
TWO job announcements from our friends at MHA, the editorship of the Journal of Mormon History and the Executive Director Position of the Mormon History Association:
Editor Search for the Journal of Mormon History
The Mormon History Association is conducting a search for a new editor of the Journal of Mormon History. The editor determines the content of the quarterly Journal, solicits submissions, oversees peer review, works with submitting authors in performing substantive and stylistic content editing, and coordinates with a production staff to ensure that issues of the Journal are published according to deadline and within budget. The editor has full editorial control of the journal but reports to the MHA board of directors in maintaining a high quality product that serves as the flagship publication for the organization.
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By matt b.June 15, 2015
This is the sixth 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 will be covering 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:
? Part 1: Prologue, Chapters 1-2
? Part 2: Chapters 3-4
? Part 3: Chapters 5-6
? Part 4: Chapters 7-9
? Part 5: Chapters 10-12
? Next week (Part 7): Chapters 16-18
Chapter 13: Priesthood and Church Government
Chapter 14: Visitors
Chapter 15: Texts
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By Tona HJune 12, 2015
This year, MHA piloted something I hope we see more of in the future: a workshop as a pre- or post-conference tour alternative. A half-day workshop about documentary editing (aka ?Geeking Out with Old Documents?) was dreamed up by JI?s own Robin Jensen of the Joseph Smith Papers Project and supported by BYU Special Collections, where the event was held. I helped make some of the initial introductions and arrangements as part of the MHA 2015 Program Committee, and then Local Arrangements took it and ran, and we all held our breath a little as the registration opened up (especially since it was up against the deservedly popular women?s history bus tour ? which I hope we get a write up about! But I digress–), not knowing who would be interested in spending a day in the library learning the ins and outs of turning an original document (letter, diary, manuscript) into a readable resource for researchers, genealogists, and possibly even for publication.
Turns out: quite a lot of folks.
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By Ben PJune 10, 2015
Mormon History Association 51st Annual Conference
Call for Papers
2016 Snowbird, Utah
?Practice?
The 51st annual meeting of the Mormon History Association will take place on June 9-12, 2016*. The conference theme is simple yet evocative: ?Practice.? The work of Mormon history in the past few decades has delved deeply into theological, institutional, and cultural research. And yet the richness of the lived realities of the Mormon experience begs to be uncovered in new ways that cut across these familiar categories. ?Practice,? in this sense, is used broadly in order to capture the dynamic participation of individual adherents within diverse strains of Mormonism throughout the past two centuries. Several decades-worth of scholarship in ?lived religion? provides the tools to capture these fresh perspectives. Mormonism?s distinctive religious morphology and substantial corpus of records creates a promising field for new theoretical understanding. What role does ?practice? play in Mormon religiosity? What is the relationship between hierarchical, correlated authority and grassroots implementation and innovation? How do Mormon practices change, evolve, and adapt over generations and throughout global communities? How are global Mormon religious norms shaped by indigenous culture in Salt Lake City, Kinshasa, or Manila?
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By Edje JeterJune 9, 2015
Below I summarize (700 words) my 2015 MHA paper (3,000 words), “The Origin and Persistence of Mormon Horns.” Note that I’ve blogged about Mormon horns before and almost all the images I used in the presentation have appeared in prior blog posts, so I’ve omitted them here.
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By Mees TielensJune 8, 2015
This is the fifth 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 will be covering 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:
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By J StuartJune 6, 2015
Every year at MHA, generous vendors, periodicals, presses, and bookstores donate their products for the Mormon History Association Student Reception. It is a fantastic event that is only possible because of their generosity. We at JI (and the MHA) would like to publicly thank those vendors. Here they are listed in alphabetical order:
Benchmark Books
BYU Studies
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
Greg Kofford Books
MHA Local Arrangements Committee
Mormon Historical Studies
Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
Signature Books
University of Illinois Press
University of Oklahoma Press
University of Utah Press
Thank you very much! If you are interested in donating books for next year’s student reception, please e-mail the Mormon History Association (or Joseph Stuart, the student representative).
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