Download or read book Writing Mormon History Historians and Their Books written by Joseph Geisner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every great book has a great backstory. Here well-known historians describe their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past, offering an unprecedented glimpse into why they wrote these important works. Writing Mormon History is a must-read for historians, students of history, scholars, and aspiring authors. The volume's contributors are Polly Aird, Will Bagley, Todd Compton, Brian Hales, Melvin Johnson, William MacKinnon, Linda King Newell, Gregory Prince, D. Michael Quinn, Craig Smith, George D. Smith, Vickie Cleverley Speek, Susan Staker, Daniel Stone, and John Turner. The majority of the essays appear here for the first time.

Download or read book Writing Mormon History 2 Authors Stories Behind Their Works written by Joseph W Geisner and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mormons and Their Historians written by Davis Bitton and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Faithful History written by George Dempster Smith and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade, Mormon history has undergone a transformation as LDS scholars have debated how their church's story should be written. New Mormon Historians distinguish between what they believe is verifiable and what they suspect may be folklore, and they approach history from a variety of different academic and social perspectives. Mormonism has also become of interest to non-LDS scholars. This raises the question of whether outsiders can truly understand Mormons, and conversely whether insiders can achieve enough detachment to see themselves objectively, or whether this is even desirable. Does history have an inherent meaning beyond the scholar's particular viewpoint, and should a writer strive to understand another person's perspective, or is one's own subjective vantage all that is possible and ultimately what is important? The new Mormon traditionalists contend that objectivity is, in fact, impossible and that history is written with certain pre-understandings; also, that some viewpoints are superior based on spiritual insight, including a belief in God and in Joseph Smith as the prophet, and that one should not impassively report examples of faith but should actively promote them. In this compilation, the editor has assembled sixteen essays which represent all sides of this ongoing discussion.

Download or read book Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History written by Gregory A. Prince and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive biography of Leonard Arrington to date--a story of scholarship and controversy

Download or read book The Mormon Experience written by Leonard J. Arrington and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1979 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best history of the Latter-Day Saints addressed to a general audience now includes a new preface, an epilogue, and a bibliographical afterword. "This is without a doubt the definitive Mormon history".--Library Journal.

Download or read book Adventures of a Church Historian written by Leonard J. Arrington and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures of a Church Historian details how Leonard J. Arrington opened up archival resources and presided, for a time, over an unprecedented era of enlightenment as he and those working under his aegis produced path-breaking works of Mormon scholarship. Arrington was the first professional historian and the first noncentral authority to serve as church historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a position he held from 1972 to 1982. Arrington's church appointment came at a crucial point in LDS history, when the institution was being transformed from a regional church whose ecclesiastical hierarchy directly presided over its congregants into a modern, worldwide church with an elaborate bureaucracy. His description of conducting research in the LDS Church Archives in the days of Elder Joseph Fielding Smith and Brother A. Will Lund provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the LDS First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Riveting chapters on the actions of the controversial Historical Department reveal details of Arrington's release and replacement as the old system gave way to the new.

Download or read book The New Mormon History written by D. Michael Quinn and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Mormon History is the banner under which many professional historians today approach Latter-day Saint historiography. Scholars who embrace this term attempt to put significant events into context rather than bracketing data that might seem challenging to traditional assumptions. These scholars are also as interested in the experience of the rank-and-file as in the lives and edicts of the leaders, and pursue questions about women, minorities, domestic life, diet, fashion, and the common church experience. They employ statistical analysis and theories and methods of the social sciences in their work. In this collection, D. Michael Quinn has selected fifteen essays which demonstrate the methods of this new history. Contributors include Thomas G. Alexander, James B. Allen, Leonard J. Arrington, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Eugene E. Campbell, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Mario S. DePillis, Robert B. Flanders, Klaus J. Hansen, William G. Hartley, Stanley S. Ivins, Dean L. May, Linda King Newell, B. H. Roberts, Jan Shipps, and Ronald W. Walker. Participants offer new ideas and give readers the opportunity to determine for themselves the relative success of these approaches by presenting examples. The collection demonstrates areas of interpretation that may be considered revisionist as well."

Download or read book Brigham Young written by John G. Turner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brigham Young was a rough-hewn New York craftsman whose impoverished life was electrified by the Mormon faith. Turner provides a fully realized portrait of this spiritual prophet, viewed by followers as a protector and by opponents as a heretic. His pioneering faith made a deep imprint on tens of thousands of lives in the American Mountain West.

Download or read book Understanding the Book of Mormon written by Grant Hardy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain once derided the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." Long and complicated, written in the language of the King James version of the Bible, it boggles the minds of many. Yet it is unquestionably one of the most influential books ever written. With over 140 million copies in print, it is a central text of one of the largest and fastest-growing faiths in the world. And, Grant Hardy shows, it's far from the coma-inducing doorstop caricatured by Twain. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Hardy offers the first comprehensive analysis of the work's narrative structure in its 180 year history. Unlike virtually all other recent world scriptures, the Book of Mormon presents itself as an integrated narrative rather than a series of doctrinal expositions, moral injunctions, or devotional hymns. Hardy takes readers through its characters, events, and ideas, as he explores the story and its messages. He identifies the book's literary techniques, such as characterization, embedded documents, allusions, and parallel narratives. Whether Joseph Smith is regarded as author or translator, it's noteworthy that he never speaks in his own voice; rather, he mediates nearly everything through the narrators Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Hardy shows how each has a distinctive voice, and all are woven into an integral whole. As with any scripture, the contending views of the Book of Mormon can seem irreconcilable. For believers, it is an actual historical document, transmitted from ancient America. For nonbelievers, it is the work of a nineteenth-century farmer from upstate New York. Hardy transcends this intractable conflict by offering a literary approach, one appropriate to both history and fiction. Regardless of whether readers are interested in American history, literature, comparative religion, or even salvation, he writes, the book can best be read if we examine the text on its own terms.

Download or read book Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon written by Wayne L. Cowdrey and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors determine that The Book of Mormon is an adaptation of an obscure historical novel. Read about their findings.

Download or read book Race and the Making of the Mormon People written by Max Perry Mueller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three "original" American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.

Download or read book Studies of the Book of Mormon written by Brigham Henry Roberts and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time fifty years after the author's death, Studies of the Book of Mormon presents this respected church leader's investigation into Mormonism's founding scripture. Reflecting his talent for combining history and theology, B. H. Roberts considered the evident parallels between the Book of Mormon and Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, a book that predated the Mormon scripture by seven years. If the Book of Mormon is not historical, but rather a reflection of the misconceptions current in Joseph Smith's day regarding Indian origins, then its theological claims are suspect as well, Roberts asserted. In this and other research, it was Roberts's proclivity to go wherever the evidence took him, in this case anticipating and defending against potential future problems. Yet the manuscript was so poorly received by fellow church leaders that it was left to Roberts alone to decide whether he had overlooked some important piece of the puzzle or whether the Mormon scripture's claims were, in fact, illegitimate. Clearly for most of his colleagues, institutional priorities overshadowed epistemological integrity. But Roberts's pathbreaking work has been judged by the editor to be methodologically sound-still relevant today. It shows the work of a keen mind, and illustrates why Roberts was one of the most influential Mormon thinkers of his day. The manuscript is accompanied by a preface and introduction, a history of the documents' provenances, a biographical essay, correspondence to and from Roberts relating to the manuscript, a bibliography, and an afterword-all of which put the information into perspective.

Download or read book Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History written by Gary Topping and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among historians of Utah and the American West, few names have greater resonance than Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Each of these writers made enduring contributions not only to our knowledge of the American West but also to our view of the region and its history. In many ways their writing set the standard for scholarship and interpretation, and their influence is still felt today. Yet they were not flawless. As Gary Topping explains in this, the first comprehensive appraisal of their work, each had serious shortcomings. DeVoto and Stegner, master storytellers, distorted their histories with excessive use of literary and artistic techniques; Morgan, the thorough researcher, failed to see larger contexts and interpretive possibilities; Brooks, courageous in finding damning new information on the Mountain Meadows massacre, stopped short of drawing conclusions that might alienate her from her fellow Mormons; and Brodie, psychobiographer extraordinaire, nonetheless succumbed to reading too much into the lives of her subjects based on her own emotions and conflicts. All five writers experienced Mormon Utah in the formative stages of their lives and, whether they wanted to or not, fashioned their work on the American West under that indelible influence. Topping shows ultimately how, despite weaknesses, each created exemplary models of diligent research and narrative elegance while establishing new traditions in western historical scholarship.

Download or read book Foundational Texts of Mormonism written by Mark Ashurst-McGee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction / Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft -- The gold plates as foundational text / Richard Lyman Bushman -- Textual criticism and the Book of Mormon / Grant Hardy -- Intertextuality and the purpose of Joseph Smith¿'s new translation of the Bible / Thomas A. Wayment -- The dictation, compilation, and canonization of Joseph Smith's revelations / Grant Underwood -- Joseph Smith's Missouri prison letters and the Mormon textual community / David W. Grua -- The textual culture of the Nauvoo Female Relief Society leadership and minute book / Jennifer Reeder -- Joseph Smith's preaching and the early Mormon documentary record / William V. Smith -- Joseph Smith's Nauvoo journals / Alex D. Smith and Andrew H. Hedges -- The early diaries of Wilford Woodruff, 1835-1839 / Laurel Thatcher Ulrich -- A textual and archival reexamination of Lucy Mack Smith's History / Sharalyn D. Howcroft -- The image as text and context in early Mormon history / Jeffrey G. Cannon -- Joseph Smith and the conspicuous absence of early Mormon documentation / Ronald O. Barney

Download or read book The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri written by Stephen C. LeSueur and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer and fall of 1838, animosity between Mormons and their neighbors in western Missouri erupted into an armed conflict known as the Mormon War. The conflict continued until early November, when the outnumbered Mormons surrendered and agreed to leave the state. In this major new interpretation of those events, LeSueur argues that while a number of prejudices and fears stimulated the opposition of Missourians to their Mormon neighbors, Mormon militancy contributed greatly to the animosity between them. Prejudice and poor judgment characterized leaders on both sides of the struggle. In addition, LeSueur views the conflict as an expression of attitudes and beliefs that have fostered a vigilante tradition in the United States. The willingness of both Missourians and Mormons to adopt extralegal measures to protect and enforce community values led to the breakdown of civil control and to open warfare in northwestern Missouri.

Download or read book Kingdom of Nauvoo The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier written by Benjamin E. Park and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.