MHA Hotel Registration and Final Program

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!

Paul Reeve Roundtable – Mormonism and Orientalism, Conclusion

For this roundtable, I was asked to give my reactions to the last two chapters: Reeve’s chapter on Mormons and Orientalism and the conclusion. I also want to provide a few thoughts in summation. I’ll try to keep the post relatively brief.

As I was reading the book, one of the things that occurred to me is that the real meat of the book lies in the chapters on Native Americans and African Americans. I agree with previous posters that Reeve has done some excellent work thinking about the racialization of Mormons affected Mormonism’s internal racial politics. At times, however, I found Reeve’s discussion of the conflation between Native Americans and Mormons unsettling. At times, he seemed to be suggesting that the creation of a Missouri county for Mormons was the same as Indian Reservations. Like Christopher Smith, I found myself wanting Reeve to add a reminder that white Mormons retained access to certain rights that other groups did not. They did so because of their skin color.

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Images: ?Scenes in the Endowment Ceremonies? in Beadle

Note: today?s post deals with temple ordinances, which can be a sensitive topic. Please tread considerately.

Today?s image, ?Scenes in the Endowment Ceremonies,? allegedly depicts portions of the Mormon ordinance of temple endowment. So far as I can tell, ?Scenes? first appeared in John H Beadle?s Life in Utah: or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (1870), which—if the title didn?t give it away—takes a dim view of Mormonism. Beadle reused the image in 1882 and again in 1904. [1] 

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Roundtable on Paul Reeve, RELIGION OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: Black, White, and Mormon, pt. 2

Miscegenation and “One Drop”

The sixth and seventh chapters of Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color focus on the six decades after plural marriage became public in 1852. In these chapters, Reeve examines the intertwining of polygamy and blackness after the 1856 presidential election, and how Mormonism’s racial restriction on priesthood/tem

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JI Summer Book Club: Rough Stone Rolling, Part 2: Chapters Three and Four

This is the second installment of the first annual JI Summer Book Club. This year we are reading Richard Bushman’s landmark biography of Mormonism founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). JI bloggers will be covering several small chunks of the book (typically 2-3 chapters) in successive weeks through the summer. New posts will appear on Monday mornings.We invite anyone and everyone interested to join along. Please use the comment section on each post to post your own reflections and commentary on the chapters under consideration and ask questions. This week Steve Fleming takes a closer look at Chapters 3 (“Translation: 1827-30”) and 4 (“A New Bible: 1830”).

Previous installments in the series:

Part I: Prologue, Chapters 1-2

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3 Translation, 4 A New Bible (See part 1 here).

Bushman ends Chapter Two and begins Chapter Three by discussing how to make sense of the possible connections between the Smiths’ “magical” treasure-digging activities and Mormonism’s foundational events: receiving and translating the golden plates. Such similarities include seer stones, special treasure in the ground, and treasure guardians.

Bushman concedes that “Magic and religion melded in Smith family culture,” (51) but he argues that by 1827, the year he married Emma and received the plates, “magic had served its purpose in his life. In a sense, it was a preparatory gospel. Treasure-seeking lore may have made it easier for his father to believe his son’s fabulous story about an angel and gold plates” (54). Thus treasure digging played a “preparatory” role in the beginnings of Mormons, argues Bushman, and the treasure-digging elements in the events related to the golden plates played the purposed of Smith gaining his treasure-digging father’s support.

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Roundtable on Paul Reeve, RELIGION OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: Black, White, and Mormon, pt. 1

Meme satirizing the “I’m A Mormon” campaign in the wake of the LDS Church’s 2013 essay on Race and the Priesthood. In context here.

Whence the priesthood ban?

It?s a question that has been wrestled often over the last several decades.  Beginning with Lester Bush?s seminal Dialogue article in 1973, historians, sociologists, and theologians have scrutinized the decisions made between Mormonism?s founding in 1830 and the solidification of the priesthood denial to Saints of African origin in the 1850s.  JI permabloggers and friends have made our own humble contributions to the debates, as well, which continue in the wake of the LDS Church?s essay published 18 months ago on the historical priesthood ban.

Building on decades of scholarship, in chapters 4 and 5 of Religion of a Different Color Paul Reeve shows that Mormonism?s banning of blacks from holding the priesthood was less a black vs. white issue in Mormonism than it was a black vs. white issue in America that Mormonism?s universalist claims were forced to confront, and to which they ultimately gave way, in attempt to preserve Mormon aspirations for whiteness.

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“My Father Had but One Ewe Lamb”: Joseph Smith and Helen, Heber, and Vilate Kimball

Helen Kimball as Joseph Smith’s 14-year-old wife understandably gets a lot of attention in discussions about Smith’s marital practices. In my dissertation, I argue that the story of Helen’s marriage to Smith sheds lights on larger issues so I’m posting those passages here. First, however, I’m posting a few paragraphs where I give a summary of my argument about Smith’s overall intent. It’s pages 371-74 of my dissertation.

The sexuality of Smith’s marriages has been much debated, but boiling Smith’s marital relationships down to sex misses the point. The point of the marriages, again, was best described by Mary Lightner, both in her description of the 1831 “sealing” and in the proposal to her by Smith: to be united with Smith so as to go with him into the Father’s kingdom. This was something that many early Mormons wanted. Oliver Huntington said that “soon after Dimick had given our sisters Zina & Prescinda to Joseph as wives for eternity,” Smith offered Dimick any reward he wanted. Dimick requested “that where you and your fathers family are, there I and my fathers family may also be.”[1] Todd Compton argues that a number of polyandrous husbands may have known about the sealing, particularly Henry Jacobs and Windsor Lyon.[2]

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Q&A With Russell W. Stevenson, Author of *For the Cause of Righteousness*

Russell W. Stevenson, author of For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 has graciously agreed to answer a few questions about his work. The book was reviewed on JI a few weeks ago. Please add any other questions you may have in the comments!

When did you begin researching For the Cause of Righteousness?

Since this developed as an outgrowth of an earlier project, Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables, one might say that I began researching as early as fall 2011. However, I began writing For the Cause in earnest in spring 2013.

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Roundtable on Paul Reeve, RELIGION OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: Red, White, and Mormon.

One day several years ago, I was sitting in my office at the LDS Church History Library reading trial transcripts for the Mountain Meadows Massacre and it suddenly occurred to me that that language being used to describe the Mormons sounded a lot like late nineteenth century language to describe African Americans. The language was racial. This was not a group of early African American Mormon converts that were being described, but a group of Southern Utah settlers, mostly of English descent, whom I had never thought of as anything but white.

For many contemporary Americans the idea that race is a historical construct still seems foreign?race doesn?t change they might say, it just is. (If you fit in that category, perhaps start with this.) In the last twenty years, we have had a proliferation of studies of race built in mostly segregated histories: Indians, African Americans, and whiteness have been central. And while all of these studies have offered insightful arguments about how we construct race and how our perceptions change over time, few have offered intersections beyond oppositional definitions. Reeve?s brilliance is found in these intersections. Rather than starting with and emphasizing Mormon exceptionalism, Reeve broadly contextualizes the evolving concepts of race and the affect on Mormonism.

Reeve?s chapters 2 and 3 illuminate Elder Berry?s American Indian child concentrating on Mormons and Native Americans??Red, White, and Mormon??both the real and the perceived. In chapter 2 it is a Mormon and Indian alliance??Ingratiating themselves with the Indians? and chapter 3 Mormons playing Indian in ?White Indians? that center his analysis.

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JI Summer Book Club: Richard Lyman Bushman?s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Prologue + Chapters 1-2)

This post kicks off the first annual JI Summer Book Club. This year we are reading Richard Bushman’s landmark biography of Mormonism founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). JI bloggers will be covering several small chunks of the book (typically 2-3 chapters) in successive weeks from now through the summer. New posts will appear on Monday mornings. We begin today with the Prologue, which sets the tone in several important respects for the rest of the book, and Chapters 1 (“The Joseph Smith Family: To 1816”) and 2 (“The First Visions: 1816-1827”). We invite anyone and everyone interested to join along. Please use the comment section on each post to post your own reflections and commentary on the chapters under consideration and ask questions.  

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I first read Rough Stone Rolling (RSR) when it was first released in 2005. I was an undergraduate history major at the time, a recently-returned Mormon missionary, and an avid if novice and somewhat naïve student of Mormon history. Bushman’s biography was not my introduction to the scholarly study of Joseph Smith or Mormon history, but it still threw me for something of a loop, challenging many of the assumptions of my faith-promoting worldview. Nevertheless, I pushed through and finished the book. I next read it three years later, in a reading seminar in BYU’s now-defunct MA program in history. My familiarity with both Mormon and American religious history more broadly was deeper by then, and reading the book alongside both an experienced historian and several budding young scholars made the book both more familiar and yet so foreign from my initial reading. That a book reads differently to the same individual at different stages in her life is a truism of nearly all books, but it is especially true in reading Rough Stone Rolling.

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