[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] This last post covers Chapters 9 through 13 of John G. Turner's excellent Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). This section of the book covers events from the Mormon Reformation, the Utah War, and Mountain Meadows in 1857 through the completion of the St. George Temple and Brigham's death in 1877. Those are twenty eventful years.
Chapters 9 and 10 start with the Mormon Reformation of 1856/57. Here's Turner's account of a typical sermon:
In mid-September 1856, Young delivered a fiery sermon in Salt Lake City, forcefully condemning a multitude of sins, ranging from adultery to dishonesty to a failure to tithe. Mincing no words, he complained that some Saints kept their "brains ... below their waistbands." He warned that the "whole people will be corrupted if we do not lop off those rotten branches." At the same time, he held out the prospect of forgiveness and spiritual empowerment, calling on the repentant to repeat their baptisms and "receive the Holy Ghost and then live in it continually." Sinners could choose between repentance and flight. Otherwise, they deserved excommunication and possibly death. (p. 255.)
[Part 1 | Part 2] This post covers Chapters 5 through 8 of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). This section of the book covers Brigham's assumption of leadership of the Church upon the death of Joseph Smith, his successful relocation of the main body of Mormons from Illinois to unsettled Utah, and the difficult first few years there, punctuated by the 1852 public announcement of the practice of plural marriage by the LDS Church.
[Part 1] This post covers Chapter 2 through 4 of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). Topics covered in this fast-paced section of the book are Brigham's early preaching as an LDS missionary, his call to the Twelve and mission to England, followed by his return to Nauvoo and initiation into polygamy as practiced under Joseph Smith.
I'm a little late to the party for John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, which has of late blazed through the Bloggernacle. I've read both Arrington's American Moses and Bringhurt's Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier, so this is familiar ground, but it's clear from other reviews that Turner uses a lot of archived letter and journal material that were either not accessible or not prominently featured in earlier books. In this post, I look at Brigham's pre-LDS religious experience as a Reformed Methodist. All quotations are from Chapter One, "A New Creature."
Turner's Book
It is hard to grasp the variety of early 19th-century sects, even within just one denomination. Brigham and his family were attracted to the Methodists but, being unhappy with the form of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gravitated toward the more congregational Reformed Methodists. Turner notes that "the Reformed Methodists exhibited several of the impulses later central to early Mormonism."
Just finished The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began (Walker and Co., 2012). It recounts a variety of episodes and events that were roiling each of the major countries in the months before they plunged into World War 1, but that were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the war. Those events were, so to speak, overshadowed by the glare of that terrible war and largely lost to the memory of those who lived after. England was dealing with near civil war over revolt in Ireland, America was preoccupied with Pancho Villa and a revolution brewing in Mexico, France was obsessed with a political scandal that derailed the career of a figure who might have argued for peace not war in 1914, and Germany's Kaiser was trying to manage a Reichstag full of feisty Social Democrats. When the heir to the Austrian crown was assassinated in Sarajevo in August, the countries tumbled into war, but it could have played out so differently. For anyone who has read Tuchman's The Guns of August, this book gives a whole different perspective on the events of 1914, both those we remember and those we have forgotten.
It is published as a reference work, but you can read it like a book, albeit a book of essays: Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2010; publisher's page), edited by W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall. Listing at $85 ($68 on Kindle), it might not find its way onto your bookshelf until a trade paperback version comes out in a few years, but at the very least it puts a very accessible LDS history reference on the shelves of America's libraries and newsrooms, featuring 140 entries covering individuals, places, events, and issues. I stumbled across a library copy that was in the stacks and could actually be checked out rather than being secured behind the librarian's firewall (that is, placed in the reference section). If you are so lucky, do the right thing and take it home for a few weeks.
I'm sure you have heard of Orson Pratt, 19th century LDS apostle, but I'm guessing you haven't heard much about his son, Orson Jr. Here's a paragraph from a post titled "Orson Pratt, Jr., Erastus Snow, apostasy and excommunication." at the Ogden Standard-Examiner's media blog Political Surf.
I recently finished America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (OUP, 2007) by Morton Keller, a retired history prof at Brandeis. The author suggests there have been three enduring American political regimes: a deferential-republican regime that lasted from the Revolution until the emergence of true party politics (Whigs and Democrats) during the 1830s; a party-democratic regime marked by strong party identification and increasing voter mobilization that lasted until roughly the Great Depression; and a populist-bureaucratic regime that saw the rise of big government, the rise of the independent media, and the decline of party identification and effectiveness. Can LDS history be parsed the same way? Are there successive LDS regimes (using "regime" in the same sense as Keller did, an enduring, stable arrangement of institutions and practices) that display significantly different ways of running the Church or of constituting the Church as an organization?
Just finished A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past (The Lyons Press, 2008) by Colin Wells. It is a quick review of all those names you have heard a time or two (Thucydides, Tacitus, Guicciardini, Ranke, Burckhardt, Turner, Braudel, etc.) woven together into a narrative. Favorite quote: “History is everywhere; we live in it.” The comments in the book that are worth discussing at an LDS blog concern the challenges of writing Church History.
I recently finished Victor Davis Hanson's Ripples of Battle (Doubleday, 2003), with the give-it-all-away subtitle How wars of the past still determine how we fight, how we live, and how we think. Generalizing a bit, not just wars but many major events and some small, unnoticed ones send ripples into the future, silently influencing future generations. Could the present, our present, have turned out differently?
In 70 AD, the Romans capped their extended campaign to crush a Jewish revolt by destroying the magnificent temple in Jerusalem. The Jews lost their temple. Earlier, they had lost political autonomy and the kingship; later, in 132 AD, another Jewish revolt was suppressed and Jews were barred from living in or even entering Jerusalem. Despite this loss of temple, king, and land, the Jews adapted and Judaism endured. In the 19th century, Mormons had their own sharp if somewhat less dramatic struggle with American government and culture. What did we Mormons lose?
There are some very sharp essays in the first section of six essays in Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries (OUP, 2009). I particularly liked Richard H. Brodhead's "Prophets in America circa 1830: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith," which provides surprising biographical comparisons you won't find in any religious history survey. But I'll talk a bit about James B. Allen's "Joseph Smith vs. John C. Calhoun: The States' Rights Dilemma and Early Mormon History."
A lot happened in Nauvoo that doesn't get covered in Sunday School or the one-volume treatments of LDS history. But Glen Leonard's Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise tells the story in detail from start to finish.
I finally got my hands on a copy of The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch's look at how the egalitarian democratic spirit that pervaded post-Revolutionary America influenced five early American religious movements: the Christians (such as the Disciples of Christ), the Methodists, the Baptists, black churches, and Mormonism.
On a recent corner-to-corner drive across the state of Wyoming, I parallelled the Mormon Trail for about 200 miles: from where the trail intersects I-25 (about 80 miles north of Cheyenne), through Casper (site of the first Mormon Ferry), along Wyoming 220 past Independence Rock, Devil's Gate, and Martin's Cove, then up US 287 past Split Rock to the Sixth Crossing of the Sweetwater River. I've never been much for pioneer tales, but I enjoyed taking in the landscape that was the common experience of the first twenty thousand Mormons who made the overland trek to Utah.
In the small world of Mormon Studies and online blogging, the term "inoculation" refers to teaching mainstream Latter-day Saints enough accurate LDS history that they won't contract a terminal case of apostasy when they encounter publications or talks that use select historical events and interpretations to present an anti-LDS message. [And, speaking broadly, that also includes publications or talks which are relatively objective or scholarly with no overt anti-LDS intent but which come across as anti-LDS to a mainstream Latter-day Saint who reads it.]
In the Saturday afternoon session of the recent LDS General Conference, Elder Quentin L. Cook, one of the newer members of the Quorum of the Twelve, related a fascinating vignette concerning Charles Dickens as part of his address ("Our Father's Plan—Big Enough For All His Children"). Here is the vignette in its entirety.
From Ernest Renan, a French 19th-century philosopher:
Forgetting, and I would say even historical error, is an essential element in the creation of a nation, and that is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger for the nation itself.
At Mormon Matters recently, "Freak Out! Handling History," listing four generic ways the author thinks Mormons deal with the details of LDS history. Not much to choose from on that menu.
After hearing Ron Walker conduct an hour-long Q&A on the book last month, I quickly finished Massacre at Mountain Meadows a couple of weeks ago. The narrative moves quickly, first laying out the historical context of the Utah War and the events in Southern Utah leading up to the massacre, then focusing on the grisly few days at Mountain Meadows. The authors reject the idea that the emigrants incited the attack and also clear Brigham Young of any direct role, placing responsibility squarlely on the locals, especially John D. Lee.
Last week I heard Ron Walker conduct a Q&A about Massacre at Mountain Meadows with a small group in Southern California. He made a couple of comments in passing that are worth discussing. When asked for one thing that could be learned from the whole episode, he said that in his view the men who brought to pass the massacre were not evil men, but that there is often not much separating goodness from evil in individuals. He said that he has gained a greater appreciation for the simple virtues like kindness, patience, and gentleness and their effect of keeping us on the right side of that narrow divide.
From Mormon Insights, "Revisiting the 1846 Mormon Crossing of Iowa," which tends to get forgotten, sandwiched as it is between the events of 1844 and the more photogenic migration across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in 1847. The trans-Iowa migration started in February 1846 and lasted five long months through cold and snow, then rain and mud.
Yesterday I taught a Sunday School class covering the letters of Alma the Younger to his sons Helaman, Shiblon, and Corainton (Alma 36-39). For a modern illustration, I used excerpts from some of the letters Brigham Young wrote to his sons and daughters, as quoted in chapter 7 of Leonard J. Arrington's Adventures of a Church Historian. Here are a couple of excerpts.
[See Part 1] This is the second installment hitting highlights in Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier. This post covers Brigham's relocation to Ohio shortly after joining the Mormon church in 1832 through the departure from Nauvoo and arrival in Winter Quarters in 1846.
I just read through the careful transcription (posted at the Juvenile Transcriptor) of a recent presentation by the authors of two recent books on the Smoot hearings. The Smoot hearings are getting some historical attention lately — I suspect Kathleen Flake's book gets some of the credit for this.
From Wednesday's Deseret News, on George P. Lee, formerly an LDS Seventy: "Prosecutors in southern Utah have dismissed criminal charges against an excommunicated general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." See full story here.
In Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero considers the decline of religious knowledge in America, much of which relates to the failure of institutions (family, school, church, university) to maintain a "chain of memory" that transmits religious knowledge from one generation to the next. President Hinckley helped Mormonism avoid this failure. Mormon memory is alive and well.
Or both? The SL Trib carried a recent story announcing the production of a new film, "Emma Smith: My Story," scheduled for release in spring of 2008. The article notes that it will be filmed at the LDS Motion Picture Studio in Provo, so I doubt that Emma's full enigmatic story will get told. And it is described as a "feature film" rather than a documentary, suggesting that the script will, uh, massage the facts a bit in order to correlate enhance the storyline and rewrite sharpen the characters. But who knows? I actually like the new Joseph Smith movie. Maybe this one will be a pleasant surprise as well.
Dallas at the newly upgraded TML has a short post on the new Teachings of Joseph Smith manual which will be used for instruction in LDS priesthood and Relief Society classes for the next two years, starting in January 2008. It is now on sale for $3 at LDS Distribution Centers. It features the newly upgraded portrait of Joseph Smith on the cover. If the Bushman biography was Rough Stone Rolling, the new manual might be called Buff Tones Beaming. An impressive sight.
Well, my earlier prospective discussion of the Sunstone session on the Bloggernacle went so well, I'll try one on "inoculation." That's shorthand for the idea that if active Mormons get a stronger dose of an "unsanitized" presentation of LDS history, they are less likely, when confronted with a presentation on Mountain Meadows or polygamy or peepstones/seerstones, to run from the building screaming "I've been duped! I feel so betrayed! I want a refund on my tithing!" Here's my position in one sentence: Inoculation looks good on paper, but the devil is in the details, little things like who, what, where, when, and how.
It has been a long time since I've posted a link and discussed an online essay, so here goes: Daniel C. Peterson's "Reflections and Reactions to Rough Stone Rolling and Related Matters," the Editor's Introduction to the current issue of the FARMS Review. Peterson touches on several of the reviews of RSR and Bushman's disappointment at how unwilling many of them were to treat the book as a serious scholarly biography. Others who at least granted that much nevertheless often took the view that no believing Mormon could write a scholarly biography of Joseph Smith.
Once upon a time, there was a book called Essentials in Church History. It was first published in 1922 and authored by Joseph Fielding Smith, who was made Assistant Church Historian in 1906 and an Apostle in 1910 (then President of the LDS Church from 1970 to 1972). For many years, this book (in one of its many successive editions) was part of every ward library and was found in most LDS homes. It was sort of expected that Mormons would read the book and know their history. It may have been faith-promoting history, but at least it spent 500 pages telling the story.
Historians don't just catalog events, they assemble events into stories or "historical narratives." But to really be relevant or worth reading, a given historical narrative has to tap into a bigger theme or "grand narrative" (using the term rather loosely). I'm going to flesh out that concept a bit, then float some observations on the emerging grand narrative that might frame Mormon history in the 21st century.
Joseph Smith, it's fair to say, was a rebel and a runner and a restless young man. That, plus his many religious accomplishments, makes him an attractive subject for biographers both in and out of the Church, who have responded by writing dozens of Joseph Smith biographies. In fact, I think that when it comes to history, Mormons are spoiled without generally knowing it. Pull down a denominational history or the biography of any other 19th-century religious figure from the shelf of your local library and you're likely to get a snoozer. By comparison, early LDS history and the adventures of Joseph Smith are religious thrillers. Yet I would say that many, even most, Mormons have not yet read their first book-length biography of Joseph Smith. Why not? And if a Latter-day Saint does decide to buy and read her first biography of Joseph, which of the many available titles should she choose (or avoid)?
The Spring 2007 issue of Dialogue includes a 40-page article entitled "Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy," by William P. MacKinnon, a historian who has published several prior articles on the Utah War. The link is to an online version of the article posted at the Dialogue site, for those of you who aren't yet subscribers. This seems like an appropriate topic for a Memorial Day post (seeing I couldn't spin the three episodes of Band of Brothers I watched this morning into a DMI post). I'll start with one paragraph giving my own view of the new importance of the Utah War and Mountain Meadows, then summarize MacKinnon's nine summary conclusions about his lifelong research on the topic.
I recently attended a presentation on the Utah War by historian David Bigler. For background on the Utah War of 1857-58, see my earlier post; this post will give a few of the interesting details in Bigler's presentation that adds to the basic story. He called it the United States' "First Civil War" (although it was the Mormons' third war). My notes are a little sketchy; for more complete coverage, see his book Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896, a history of 19th-century Utah that (I'm told) doesn't pull any punches.
I've got three posts lined up on the Utah War of 1857-58 and the unfortunate occurrence at Mountain Meadows. This post is a general overview that will be a set-up for the posts to follow. Here are two links that give excellent short essays on the Utah War: "The Utah War," an article by Richard D. Poll in the online Utah History Encyclopedia; and "Utah Expedition," also by Poll, from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. A related article is "The LDS Reformation of 1856-57," by Paul H. Peterson, also from the Encyclopdia.
I'd like to start doing Sunday posts with a little different flavor, either borrowing from talks or lessons prepared for class or just whipping up something mildly edifying on the spot. I'll do some posts on Paul and his letters later in the year. For now, I'll share a passage I ran across in connection with President Hinckley's talk The Faith to Move Mountains from the October 2006 Conference. He recounted the story of how Brigham Young, in October 1856, sent out rescue caravans to find and feed migrating Saints stranded in snowy Wyoming and escort them back to Salt Lake City. I looked up the relevant material in Allen and Leonard's The Story of the Latter-day Saints. Quite a tale.
Here's a second post based on The American West: A New Interpretive History (see the first post), another attempt to link LDS history with Western History in three paragraphs or less. I'll summarize the material from Chapter 12, "A Search For Community," that shows how singularly successful Mormons in Utah were at building community in the West. It was a much different approach than that of the stereotypical pioneer family: "Rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi West was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." Not for the Mormons, who embraced hard work but not monotony or isolation. The resulting sense of community carried through to the extended Church of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Earlier I posted on Republican Religion, which touched on the tenor of religion immediately following the Revolutionary War. In this post I review what happened to the American religious scene during the first third of the 19th century, right up to the founding of the LDS Church in 1830. I'm using material from Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800-1830, particularly the second chapter, entitled "Christianizing the Republic."
As I see it, history offers a more promising avenue for understanding Mormonism than doctrinal speculation (in all its varieties). History offers the advantage of talking about things that actually happened — it's more than just a clever word game. But what do you do with Mormon history? What does it mean? It seems to tell us something relevant about Mormonism and about our own religious identity, but what exactly does it or can it tell us?
I'm halfway through The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), an award-winning retelling of how the West was won. Hint: it's not a pretty picture. While Mormon pioneers get mentioned briefly, the book is more valuable (to the LDS reader) as a summary of just how violent and unfriendly 19th-century America was to those who weren't white and Protestant. It wasn't just the Mormons that got the short end of the stick. But in this post I'll focus on the concept of Mormons as a frontier people. In what way are the Mormons a frontier people, you ask?
I'm talking about 18th-century republicans — the Revolutionary War kind of republicanism. I just finished The American Revolution: A History (2002) by Gordon S. Wood. It includes ten pages on "Republican Religion" that speak directly to the religious background of Joseph Smith, Jr., and his parents. Seems like a topic worth sharing.
I was hoping for something interesting when I clicked on this post at M-Star last week claiming a link between George Orwell and Mormonism, but it was a hoax. Okay, call it a clever hook — something I would never do. But then, lo and behold, just the next day I stumbled across the following passage in Down and Out in Paris and London recounting Orwell's actual encounter with two Mormon missionaries in interwar England.
After Theory Terry Eagleton on whatever it is that comes after postmodernism. My Post
Experiments in Ethics A moral philosopher's surprisingly entertaining critique of traditional philosophical ethics using modern experimental data. • My post
Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique The prolific astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin reviews where Earth came from, why it is here, and how it will end (in a rain of cometary chunks from the Oort Cloud in about a million years). Read all about it in my post The Fate of the Earth.
Ancient Israelite Religion Susan Niditch explores myth, ritual, experience, and ethics in the Hebrew Bible and using surviving archeological artifacts, revealing a surprisingly diverse ancient Israelite religion. • My Post
Davies: The Mormon Culture of Salvation Uses a variety of models to look at LDS doctrine and cultural practice related to death and salvation, with a lengthy consideration of the "world religion" question. My Post • Pub Note
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