By J StuartJune 5, 2015
Please join us in congratulating this year’s winners of the 2015 Mormon History Association Awards (JI bloggers are bolded):
Leonard J. Arrington Award: Néstor Esteban Curbelo Armando
Best Book Award: Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City,:Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
Best First Book Award: David J. Howlett, Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of of Illinois Press, 2014).
Best Biography: Julie Debra Neuffer, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014).
Best Documentary Editing/Bibliography: Terryl L.Givens and Reid L. Neilson, eds. The Columbia Sourcebook of Mormons in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Best Family/Community History: Donna Smart Toland, Finding Rachel & Myra Among Henrie Pioneers (self-published).
Best Personal History/Memoir: Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels (Grand Rapids, MIL Wm. B. Erdmans Press, 2014).
Best International Book: Marjorie Newton, Mormon and Maori (Salt Lake City,:Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
Best Article: Andrea G. Radke-Moss, “I hid [the Prophet] in a corn patch’: Mormon Women as Healers, Concealers, and Protectors in the 1838 Mormon-Missouri War,” Mormon Historical Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 25-40.
Article Awards of Excellence (2): David Walker, “Transporting Mormonism: Railroads and Religious Sensation in the American West,” in Sally Promey, ed. Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 581-603.
Christopher James Blythe, “Would to God, Brethren, I could Tell you Who I Am!’: Nineteenth-Century Mormonisms and the Apotheosis of Joseph Smith,” Nova Religio: The Journal Of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18 no. 2 (2014): 5-27.
Best International Article (2): Casey Paul Griffiths, Scott Esplin, Barbara Morgan, and E. Vance Randall “Colegios Chilenos de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias’: The History of Latter-day Saint Schools in Chile,” Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 1 (2014): 97-134.
Dylan Beatty, “Mamona and the Mau: Latter-day Saints Amidst Resistance in Colonial Samoa,” Pacific Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 48-74.
Best Article on Mormon Women’s History: Rachel Cope, “Composing Radical Lives: Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs” in Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion, ed. Mary McCartin Wearn (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 45-58.
Best Dissertation Award: Max Perry Mueller, “Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880,” Harvard University.
Best Thesis Award: Joseph Stuart, “Holy Races: Race in the Formation of Mormonism and the Nation of Islam,” University of Virginia.
Best Graduate Paper: Charlotte Hansen Terry, University of Utah, “Rhetoric vs. Reality: Mormon Women’s Diaries and Domesticity in the Early Twentieth Century.”
Congratulations to all the winners!
By J StuartJune 3, 2015
If you can believe it, we are only a few days away from #MHA50! Several JI permabloggers are presenting at the conference and more of us will be attending. A smattering of abstracts from several of our authors can be found below.
Here’s the format: Name: Paper Title (top) Session Title (Bottom). Let me know if this is confusing.
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By Ben PJune 2, 2015
Anniversary conferences are a wonderful time to have retrospective panels that aim to chart the field’s development and future. Therefore, for MHA’s 50th anniversary, I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a panel that looks back on Mormon history’s most successful (in terms of academic awards) and most divisive (in terms of praise/rejection) book in the last few decades: John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (Cambridge UP, 1994). A recipient of both Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s Best Book Prize, most Mormon historians denounced the book as methodologically flawed and, in some corners, as anti-Mormon. This led to a bifurcated legacy: on the one hand, most religious historians’ only exposure to Mormonism is through the book, given its wide academic popularity, while most Mormon historians have tended to dismiss it and pretend it never happened.
Two decades later, it is time for a fresh look of both the book and its reception. What does Refiner’s Fire tell us about Mormonism’s place in the academy in the 1990s? What does its reception tell us about New Mormon History’s relationship to the broader historical community? How have the two fields developed in the past twenty years?
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By J StuartJune 1, 2015
This is the fourth 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:
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 7, “The Kirtland Visionaries: January-June 1831”
Chapter 8, “Zion: July-December 1831” and Chapter 9, “The Burden of Zion: 1832”
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By Tona HMay 31, 2015
The sixties beget all kinds of social experiments, and even Mormons were not immune to the call of the bohemian zeitgeist of their times. It may interest you to know that in the late 1960s there was an artists’ commune in the foothills of Alpine, Utah, calling themselves the Art & Belief Movement. Four artists – sculptor Neil Hadlock, figurative artist Dennis Smith, symbolist realist Gary Ernest Smith, and romantic realist Trevor Southey – and their families formed the core of the group. Though as transitory as many hippie communes of the era, this Mormon version is worth a closer look.
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By JJohnsonMay 29, 2015
Two years ago, I wrote a post called, ?In the Ghetto: I Like It Here, but When Can I Get Out?? I lamented the separation of Mormon women?s history from the general narrative of the church. Having people read what you?ve written is always lovely, but it is exponentially better when someone continues to think about something you?ve written and then chooses to do something about it. Thank you, Ardis.
Ardis Parshall–the mastermind behind the Mormon history blog Keepapitchinin–has moved to act. Always one to go above and beyond, Ardis has begun a daunting project of writing a broad synthesis of Mormon history written from the perspective of women–She Shall Be an Ensign. And she needs our support.
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By Natalie RMay 29, 2015
I have been absent from the blog for quite some time (yes over a year 🙁 ) But I am back to write about?my dissertation writing process. Future posts will be back to our fave topic of Mormon history. However, I know many of us are writers, researchers, and scholars and are regularly engaged in some form of writing.
Now, this is not a prescriptive post about how to write the dissertation. In fact, it is far from it. Instead, I am going to share some of the tools that were and are essential to my writing.
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By Edje JeterMay 28, 2015
Since I lead a very exciting life, foot/endnotes are something I think about fairly frequently: How many? How long? How detailed? Foot or end? To excerpt or merely to cite? And so on. In an attempt to clarify my thinking, I have sketched a few thoughts, rants, and peeves.
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By Edje JeterMay 26, 2015
This is the third 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.
Installments:
__________________________
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By J StuartMay 22, 2015
The following message is from our friends at The Mormon History Association:
Have you reserved your room yet for the fast-approaching MHA conference? MHA has arranged for a discounted room rate of just $99/night at the conference hotel, the Provo Marriott. Call 801-377-4700 to make your reservations. Be sure to mention MHA to receive the group rate. If you are interested in finding a roommate to share the cost of the room, send us an email to 2015conference@mormonhistoryassociation.org and we’ll assist you. Type “room share” in the email’s subject line when you contact us.
#MHA50
$99 for a Marriott room is a fantastic bargain if you don’t have accommodations arranged, please take advantage of this deal. Then you don’t have to worry about driving home from the conference at night, driving to the conference in the morning, or the burden of forgetting something important in your hotel room. If costs are an issue, there are many folks looking to share a room to defer costs. Be sure to take advantage of the MHA’s offer to line you up with a roommate who is as interested in Mormon History as you are!
You can also view the final program for the conference here: MHA Program-Final. See you in Provo!
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