Bushman at Session 1

Meridian posted a summary of the first session of the recent Joseph Smith Symposium at the Library of Congress. The article is the first of a series of balanced overviews of the conference sessions. They're a nice way to review the conference without having to sit through the whole video archive. Richard L. Bushman (emeritus history prof at Columbia) was the primary presenter at the first session, with responses by Robert V. Remini (emeritus history prof at Chicago), Richard T. Hughes (history prof at Pepperdine), and Grant Underwood (history prof at BYU).

BUSHMAN'S REMARKS were entitled "Joseph Smith's Many Histories," which may have an ironic undertone but is intended to refer to the many perspectives historians have brought to Joseph Smith and his work. According to the article, Bushman argued that viewing Joseph in the context of early 19th-century America is too narrow a view; instead, the proper context is the "history of apostasy and resotration." He identified Jan Shipps, John Brooke, and Harold Bloom as commentators whose portraits of Joseph at least widen their scope beyond the immediate historical context. That strikes me as an odd comment — historians generally criticize people for viewing historical figures out of their historical context, not for viewing them in their proper historical context.

THE RESPONDENTS offered different perspectives. Remini suggested Joseph's immediate historical context, both his family environment and antebellum 19th-century America, as the proper context for a JS biographer, and sees Joseph as "the quintessential American." It's hard to read the Remini section without humming a few bars from New World Man. Hughes focused on the links between Alexander Campbell, another 19th-century Restorationist, but one who viewed the Bible as providing sufficient authority and guidance for restoring whatever was missing from contemporary Christianity. Having just seen National Treasure on DVD, I noted his reference to "Novus ordo seclorum" on the Great Seal of the United States (or as seen on the back of our present one-dollar bill) as capturing the spirit of resotration that was in the air in Joseph's day. Finally, Underwood gave the standard Official Mormon Disclaimer that "all histories are subjective and the creation of the authors, thus making it difficult to construct an accurate picture of any historical figure." Difficult, but not impossible — isn't that the raison d'etre of historians? Isn't that what they get paid for?

Comments

[Clark Goble]

For those interested, we've been debating the point Bushman was making over at my blog. Oddly the responses and questions were not on the MP-3 hosted at LDS.org.