Time: Friday, March 12, 2:00 p.m.
Location: South Assembly room
Moderator: Spencer Fluhman
Presenter:
- 2:00 Steven C. Harper, Brigham Young University
Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the Mysteries of Memory
- 2:35 Debra Marsh, University of Utah
Respectable Assassins: A Collective Biography and Socio-economic Study of the Carthage Mob
- 3:05 Samuel Brown, University of Utah
The Cultural Work of Martyrdom in Early LDS History
The papers in this session, both implicitly and explicitly, consider the ways in which memory determines our understandings and interpretations of the past. Indeed, historical subjects remember and forget particular details about their experiences; this ultimately determines how they define and describe their lives. Likewise, writers of history create and shape the past through the particular lenses they use as they describe events, people and ideas. As Steve Harper, Debra Marsh and Sam Brown's presentations make clear, an understanding of memory sheds light on Joseph Smith's personal history: these presentations explore the life of the prophet both as he remembered it and as scholars have chosen to describe and understand it. The presenters thus challenge and clarify historiographical ideas, while adding insights of their own to important subjects.
Steve Harper's paper is written as "an answer to Dan Vogel’s declarative question: 'When Smith fails to mention foundational visions until years after the event and gives conflicting and anachronistic accounts of them, how certain can one be that he relates events as he experienced them at the time?'” By engaging with this question, Harper suggests that memory is a matter of reconstruction rather than reproduction. Turning to the First Vision as a case study, the presentation makes it clear that there is a difference between interpretive and factual memory; furthermore, Harper suggests that Joseph relied on both as he told his story. While the prophet's recollection of specific details varied in some cases, his sense of their meaningfulness remained deep and memorable. Indeed, as emotion and rumination combined, they became vivid, enduring memories of a profound theophany that changed a life and lives.
Although Debra Marsh's paper does not grapple with questions about memory directly, it does challenge historical inaccuracies that have been perpetuated over time. Specifically, she contends that "the fate of the persecutors of the prophet Joseph Smith" were not what N. B. Lundwall proclaimed. Her paper corrects these ideas by exploring the experiences and identities of the Carthage Mob members prior to and following the martyrdom of the prophet Joseph Smith. Because popular Mormon memory sometimes continues to cling to the idea that mob members lost eyeballs and were eaten by worms (my own grandmother informed me of this a week ago), Marsh provides evidence that challenges and corrects these misconceptions. The mob members, she shows, actually lived typical lives.
While Marsh challenges conceptions of what followed the prophet's death, Sam Brown provides context and analysis that enables historical memory to shift and expand. Brown places Joseph Smith's martyrdom experience within the culture of death and martyrdom in nineteenth-century America. He begins by noting the problems associated with the providential world view that dominated the antebellum era: simply stated, "everything happens for a reason." Because unexpected and premature death challenged the providential system, Brown explains, people sought explanations for death. In the case of martyrdom, they concluded that death was the result of another's sin. Brown thus uses these themes to explores aspects of Protestant culture, each of which add crucial contextual details to Joseph's martrydom.
By looking through the lens of memory, these presentations provide keen insights into the life and death of the prophet, challenge criticisms and misinterpretations, contextualize important events and suggest that exploration and rumination are an important part of history making and history writing.
