1. The Museum of Church History and Art, which opened in April 1984, was renamed the “Church History Museum” in November 2008.

2. For more on the New Mormon History, see Thomas G. Alexander, “Historiography and the New Mormon History: A Historian’s Perspective,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 25–49; Henry Warner Bowden, “From the Age of Science to an Age of Uncertainty: History and Mormon Studies in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 105–20; Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, and James B. Allen, Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 60–112.

3. Curt Bench, “Fifty Important Mormon Books,” Sunstone 14, no. 5 (October 1990): 54.

4. Bench, “Fifty Important Mormon Books,” 55. In 2002, Arnold K. Garr published an updated survey of “scholars who teach, research, and write in the field of Mormonism.” Smith’s Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith sat atop the “Doctrine” category and was voted “the most important nonscriptural volume.” Smith had four titles that received votes, but none approached the popularity of Teachings. Arnold K. Garr, “Which Are the Most Important Mormon Books?” BYU Studies 41, no. 3 (2002): 35–47.

5. Bench, “Fifty Important Mormon Books,” 54–57.

6. Joseph Fielding Smith, “Libels of Historians,” Improvement Era 10, no. 2 (December 1906): 103.

7. Armand L. Mauss identified “five major expressions” of retrenchment in Mormonism around the mid-twentieth century: the reassertion of the importance of revelation, especially those received by prophets; more emphasis on genealogy and temple work; adjustments to and an expansion of the missionary program; more focus on the family unit; and an expansion of religious education programs, including “a new mandate for indoctrination rather than intellectual reconciliation.” Mauss also drew parallels between the theological conservatism exhibited in this era and fundamentalist religious thought which in general was “characterized by such beliefs as scriptural inerrancy and literalism; . . . authoritarian leadership; and strict obedience to pastoral injunctions.” Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 99, 157–58; see also Armand L. Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Campaign for Respectability,” Dialogue 44, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 1–42.

8. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation: Sermons and Writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, comp. Bruce R. McConkie, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1956), 3:275–76.

9. For a good summary of mid-century Mormonism’s theological conservatism, see Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), 190–91.

10. Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 206–7.

11. Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 164–65; Bowman, Mormon People, 190–91, 197.

12. Klaus J. Hansen, quoted in Alexander, “Historiography and the New Mormon History,” 30.

13. Matthew Bowman, “Context and the New-New Mormon History,” Journal of Mormon History 35, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 209.

14. For book and article treatments of Smith’s life, see Joseph F. McConkie, True and Faithful: The Life Story of Joseph Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1971); Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. (III) and John J. Stewart, The Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, Tenth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972); Francis M. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith: Gospel Scholar, Prophet of God (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992); Dean May, “Tenth President: Joseph Fielding Smith,” in The Presidents of the Church, ed. Preston Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1974), 409–24; Heidi S. Swinton, “Joseph Fielding Smith,” in In the Company of Prophets: Personal Experiences of D. Arthur Haycock with Heber J. Grant, George Albert Smith, David O. McKay, Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, and Ezra Taft Benson (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993), 56–68; Susan Arrington Madsen, “Joseph Fielding Smith: Historian, Author, Pie-Maker,” in The Lord Needed a Prophet, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 155–67; Francis M. Gibbons, “Joseph Fielding Smith,” in Dynamic Disciples, Prophets of God: Life Stories of the Presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 216–37.

15. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, v–vi.

16. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 51–61, 106–8, 123–24, 453–57, 493–94; Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 65–83, 206–7, 355–57.

17. The writings of nationalist historians, such as Francis Parkman and George Bancroft, followed a romantic literary style and highlighted the triumphs of Protestantism and the Anglo-Saxon race. Their histories of American civilization, and others written outside the fledgling professional historical guild, remained popular in the early twentieth century. Thomas Bender, “Writing American History, 1789–1945,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 4: 1800–1945, ed. Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 372–74.

18. Following World War I, some professional historians, such as Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker, rejected the notion of historical objectivity as fully achievable. Many historians now see history as an interpretive field and consider no historian objectively removed from or an impartial writer on his or her historical subject. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 47–53, 133–205; Thomas Bender, “Writing American History, 1789–1945,” 380.

19. As early as 1917, Smith railed against “the theories of evolution, of higher criticism, the ideas that prevail in the schools throughout our land that are dangerous” and were “striking at the fundamentals of the gospel of Jesus Christ, trying to destroy the faith in the minds of the students who attend the schools.” Eighty-Seventh Annual Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1917), 64.

20. For more on the crisis that gripped Protestantism during this period, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986); William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

21. Joseph Fielding Smith, Man: His Origin and Destiny (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954), 490; Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136.

22. Bowman, Mormon People, 163–67.

23. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, 123–33; Thomas G. Alexander, “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology,” Sunstone 5, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1980): 28–33.

24. Bowman, Mormon People, 165–67.

25. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, 1–61.

26. Richard Sherlock, “‘We Can See No Advantage to a Continuation of the Discussion’: The Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair,” Dialogue 13, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 63–78; Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 309–14. Roberts’s manuscript remained unpublished until 1994. See B. H. Roberts, The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994), second edition published 1996, page references hereafter are to the second edition; Stan Larson, ed., The Truth, the Way, the Life, an Elementary Treatise: The Masterwork of B. H. Roberts (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1994).

27. Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 81–83.

28. Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 92–121; Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 78–85.

29. Michael A. Goodman, “Correlation: The Turning Point (1960s),” in Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, ed. Scott C. Esplin and Kenneth L. Alford (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, 2011), 259–84; Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 139–58.

30. At the April 1963 general conference, where Elder Harold B. Lee announced details of the Churchwide priesthood correlation program at a general priesthood meeting, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles consisted of Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Mark E. Petersen, Delbert L. Stapley, Marion G. Romney, LeGrand Richards, Richard L. Evans, Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and N. Eldon Tanner. One Hundred Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1963), 1, 79–89.

31. By 1973, all Church curriculum was supervised by a general Curriculum Department whose aim was to produce curriculum that could be “used anywhere in the world, under any cultural or political circumstance, so that the only culture we’re bound by is the culture of the gospel.” Church News, December 29, 1990, 6, 10, quoted in Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 164.

32. Beginning in 1961, Apostle Harold B. Lee chaired the newly formed All-Church Coordinating Council to simplify and streamline curriculum for all priesthood and auxiliary units of the Church. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 149–52; Bowman, Mormon People, 195.

33. Michael A. Goodman, “Correlation: The Early Years,” in A Firm Foundation: Church Organization and Administration, ed. David J. Whittaker and Arnold K. Garr (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, 2011), 321–35.

34. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 109–10.

35. See Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 154–55, 163.

36. Joseph F. Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], “Asahel Smith of Topsfield, with Some Account of the Smith Family,” 87–101, in The Historical Collections of the Topsfield Historical Society, ed. George Francis Dow, vol. 8 (Topsfield, Mass.: Topsfield Historical Society, 1902).

37. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 140.

38. Leopold von Ranke was a nineteenth-century German historian considered by many as the founder of professional, scientific history grounded in objective inquiry and historical sources. Even with objectivity in mind, Ranke still wrote according to the romanticism and nationalism of his age and frequently highlighted universal truths borne out by the historical record. Matthew Bowman, “James Talmage, B. H. Roberts, and Confessional History in a Secular Age,” in Standing Apart: Mormon Historical Consciousness and the Concept of Apostasy, ed. Miranda Wilcox and John D. Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 79; Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1–20.

39. Karen Lynn Davidson and others, eds., Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2012), 208, 210.

40. Joseph F. Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage: A Discussion (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1905) (94 pp.).

41. Joseph Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], The “Reorganized” Church vs. Salvation for the Dead (n.p., 1905) (32 pp.).

42. Wilford Woodruff, “Official Declaration,” Deseret Evening News, September 25, 1890, 2; Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 134.

43. R. C. Evans, interview in the Toronto, Canada, Daily Star, January 28, 1905, quoted in Smith, Blood Atonement, 7.

44. Joseph Smith on occasion advocated for capital punishment for murderers as a means of acquiring just payment for the shedding of blood. Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders repeatedly taught a formalized version of blood atonement during (and after) what became known as the Mormon Reformation in 1856–57, which, as some historians have put it, “must have helped create a climate of violence in the [Utah] territory, especially among those who chose to take license from it.” Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25–27; Robert H. Briggs, “Mormonism and Violence,” in Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 345–46. The LDS Church no longer espouses teachings related to blood atonement. “Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.lds.org/topics/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints?lang=eng.

45. Woodruff, “Official Declaration,” 2; Joseph F. Smith, “Official Statement by President Joseph F. Smith,” Deseret Evening News, Apr. 6, 1904, 1.

46. John Powell, “The Church Rejected—When?” Improvement Era 7, no. 11 (September 1904): 817–28.

47. Joseph F. Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], Origin of the “Reorganized” Church: The Question of Succession (Salt Lake City: Skelton Publishing Co., 1907) (139 pp.).

48. Smith witnessed or engaged in a debate with RLDS officials at the Historian’s Office on a few occasions. RLDS missionary Amos Milton Chase debated Smith on the origins and divinity of LDS teachings on plural marriage in January 1904. Smith recorded the exchange in his journal. See Joseph Fielding Smith, Journal, January 14, 1904, and August 19, 1903, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

49. Susa Young Gates, “On the Altar of Motherhood,” Improvement Era 11, no. 7 (May 1908): 540–43.

50. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 128, 138–39, 145–47. See also Frank J. Cannon, Selected Frank J. Cannon Salt Lake Tribune Editorials during the Reed Smoot Hearings, 1940–1907, and Snippets from Frank J. Cannon’s Campaign against Mormonism during the 1910s, ed. Michael Harold Paulos and Kenneth L. Cannon II (n.p., 2010).

51. See B. H. Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1893), vi.

52. The RLDS Church did not directly break away from the movement started by James Strang, but many disaffected Strangites joined the RLDS Church after its organization in 1860. RLDS leaders refused to acknowledge Strang as a legitimate successor to Joseph Smith, and Strang died in 1856 without appointing his own successor. Vickie Cleverley Speek, “From Strangites to Reorganized Latter Day Saints: Transformations in Midwestern Mormonism, 1856–79,” in Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and John C. Hamer (Independence, Mo.: John Whitmer Books, 2007), 141–60.

53. B. H. Roberts, Succession in the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1894). For Joseph Fielding Smith’s use of B. H. Roberts’s work, see Joseph F. Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], Origin of the “Reorganized” Church and the Question of Succession (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909), 12, 82.

54. Joseph Fielding Smith, Essentials in Church History (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1922) (694 pp.).

55. Previously titled The American Historical Magazine.

56. Davis Bitton, “B. H. Roberts as Historian,” Dialogue 3, no. 4 (Winter 1968): 26.

57. Walker, Whittaker, and Allen, Mormon History, 35–36. Essentials was released as the Church’s priesthood manual for 1922, but it quickly became the premier institutional history on the LDS Church. For twenty-six editions, Church-owned Deseret Book sold ten thousand copies a year, and the book did not go out of print until after Smith’s death in 1972, when Mormon leaders commissioned the Church’s Historical Department to write a new volume to take its place. Leonard J. Arrington and his counterparts in the History Division of the Church’s Historical Department were tasked with publishing objective, professional historical scholarship on Mormon history. The Story of the Latter-day Saints (1976), written by James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, was the intended replacement volume for Essentials, but some Mormon leaders expressed concerns upon its release that the volume was too secular and would cause some to doubt their faith. Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 139–40.

58. James E. Talmage, The Great Apostasy: Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909).

59. Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History, 121–228.

60. Smith was later accused by one historian of the massacre of ignoring the records in the Historian’s Office “of which he is the custodian.” More use of the Church’s records by Smith, she felt, would have yielded the conclusion that the massacre “was definitely not the crime of a single individual, nor the responsibility of only one man.” Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950), 160. Previously, in Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage (1905), Smith boldly declared “The ‘Mormon’ people were not guilty of the Mountain Meadows massacre” and cited Hubert H. Bancroft’s History of Utah (1889) to lay blame solely with Lee. Smith, Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage, 44. In 2008, Richard E. Turley Jr., then Assistant Church Historian and Recorder for the LDS Church, and former historians for the LDS Historical Department, Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, reversed Smith’s conclusion in the opening to their book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: “The perpetrators [of the massacre] were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aided by Indians.” Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, iv.

61. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian, 139.

62. For example, from 1998 until 2017, LDS Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society classes taught from a series of manuals entitled Teachings of Presidents of the Church. Each year, a different Church president’s life and teachings were studied, until the series concluded in 2017 with Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Gordon B. Hinckley.

63. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 224; Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian, 139.

64. Joseph Fielding Smith, Life of Joseph F. Smith, Sixth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938) (490 pp.).

65. In January 1841, Hyrum Smith was appointed to replace Oliver Cowdery as a “prophet, and a seer, and a revelator” to “act in concert” with Joseph Smith. Cowdery had been ordained as a second elder of the Church on April 6, 1830. Hyrum Smith was also chosen to “take the office of Priesthood and Patriarch” for the Church (D&C 124:91–94; D&C 20:3). William Clayton recorded a clarification on Hyrum’s status made by Joseph Smith in a July 1843 sermon: “Hyrum held the office of prophet to the church by birth-right & he was going to have a reformation and the saints must regard Hyrum for he has authority.” Shortly after the death of Joseph and Hyrum, Brigham Young commented at a conference in Nauvoo that “if Hyrum had lived he would not have stood between Joseph and the Twelve, but he would have stood for Joseph . . . [and] would have acted for Joseph.” Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds., Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April 1843, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011), xviii–xix; Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Brent M. Rogers, eds. Journals, Volume 3: May 1843–June 1844, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2015), 61; “October Conference Minutes,” Times and Seasons 5, no. 19 (October 15, 1844): 683.

66. For a similar argument see, Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 109–37.

67. Joseph Fielding Smith, Church History and Modern Revelation, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1946–49) (833 pp.).

68. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 368.

69. Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 81–99.

70. See Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 81–99; Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 45–49.

71. Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 141–42; Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 165.

72. Joseph Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], Salvation Universal (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1912) (32 pp.).

73. Joseph Fielding Smith, Elijah the Prophet and His Mission (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1924) (32 pp.). In a 1957 reprinting of Salvation Universal by Deseret Book, the pamphlet was combined with Smith’s Elijah the Prophet and His Mission (1924) into a single book.

74. The Genealogical Society of Utah was founded in 1894. James B. Allen, Jessie L. Embry, and Kahlile B. Mehr, Hearts Turned to the Fathers: A History of the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1894–1994 (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1995), 11. See Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 1 (January 1910).

75. McConkie, True and Faithful, 39.

76. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 150–51.

77. The column was first published in the November 1909 edition of the Improvement Era and continued to be published in subsequent editions until March 1910. See Joseph F. Smith Jr. [Joseph Fielding Smith], “Salvation Universal,” Improvement Era 13, no. 1 (November 1909): 38–45; Joseph Fielding Smith, Elijah the Prophet and His Mission; Salvation Universal (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1957), 59.

78. Early Mormonism drew comparisons to universalism partially because of Joseph Smith’s revelation, titled “The Vision,” canonized in Doctrine and Covenants 76. The revelation declared “glad tidings” that “all might be saved . . . except those sons of perdition who deny the Son after the Father has revealed him” (D&C 76:40, 43). Casey Paul Griffiths, “Universalism and the Revelations of Joseph Smith,” in The Doctrine and Covenants, Revelations in Context, ed. Andrew H. Hedges, J. Spencer Fluhman, and Alonzo L. Gaskill (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2008), 168–87.

79. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 150–51.

80. Smith, Elijah the Prophet and His Mission; Joseph Fielding Smith, “Elijah the Prophet and His Mission,” Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 12 (January 1921): 1–20.

81. Joseph Smith Jr., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1912), 6:249–54; Wilford Woodruff, Journal, March 10, 1844, Church History Library; Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833–1898, Typescript, ed. Scott G. Kenney, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983), 2:359–66.

82. Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection: Short Discourses on Gospel Themes (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1931) (365 pp.).

83. Topical Outlines to the Way to Perfection (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, [1932]), 1.

84. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 370.

85. See Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 40–41; W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 255–56.

86. Smith would be more explicit on this point in Answers to Gospel Questions, stating that blacks were “not valiant” in the premortal existence, and, “because of their lack of obedience, they . . . came here under restrictions. One of those restrictions is that they were denied the priesthood.” Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966), 5:163. According to W. Paul Reeve, Smith’s writings indicated “a transition” in Mormon thought on the priesthood and temple ban as “the premortal life slowly supplanted the curse of Cain justification” for the ban “even as the premortal reason experienced a modification of its own, from ‘neutral’ to ‘less valiant.’” Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 255. Scholars attribute the “pre-existence thesis” first to Orson Hyde, and it was subsequently expanded and modified by Smith. See Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 218–19.

87. Joseph Fielding Smith, The Progress of Man (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1936) (530 pp.).

88. See, for example, Talmage, Great Apostasy; Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History.

89. Bowman, “James Talmage, B. H. Roberts, and Confessional History,” 84.

90. John G. Turner, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2016), 141–49.

91. Discussion Themes for Class Studies of “The Progress of Man” (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1937), 4.

92. Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History; Talmage, Great Apostasy.

93. Smith borrowed this perspective on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from contemporary Mormon writers and from nineteenth-century Protestant theologians and historians who conceived of the Middle Ages as a period of spiritual and intellectual darkness and decline in civilization reversed only by the classical learning and advances of the Renaissance era. Current scholarship now notes significant advances during the Middle Ages and pushes back on the narrative of a “Dark Ages.” Eric R. Dursteler, “Historical Periodization in the LDS Great Apostasy Narrative,” in Wilcox and Young, Standing Apart, 23–54.

94. Quoting John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Age of Despots (New York: H. Holt, 1888), 1.

95. See, for example, Ezra Taft Benson’s general conference address, “A Witness and a Warning,” Ensign 9 (November 1979): 31–33. On Benson’s patriotism and conservatism, see Patrick Q. Mason, “Ezra Taft Benson and Modern (Book of) Mormon Conservatism,” in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, ed. Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 63–80.

96. Joseph Fielding Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith: Taken from His Sermons and Writings as They Are Found in the Documentary History and Other Publications of the Church and Written or Published in the Days of the Prophet’s Ministry (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938) (410 pp.).

97. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 211–12.

98. Edwin F. Parry, Joseph Smith’s Teachings: A Classified Arrangement of the Doctrinal Sermons and Writings of the Great Latter-day Prophet (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1912) (192 pp.).

99. In 1838, Joseph Smith with the assistance of Sidney Rigdon, George W. Robinson, and, later, James Mullholland, began work on a manuscript history of the Church. The project was not finished until 1856, when George A. Smith and Wilford Woodruff extended the manuscript through August 1844. It was published as the “History of Joseph Smith” in the Times Seasons in Nauvoo until February 1846 and continued in Utah in the Deseret News beginning in November 1851. B. H. Roberts’s seven-volume History of the Church (1902–12, 1932) relied heavily on the manuscript, but Roberts also made extensive silent revisions and updates to the history. “Introduction to History, 1838–1856 (Manuscript History of the Church),” Joseph Smith Papers, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/doc/introduction-to-history-1838-1856-manuscript-history-of-the-church. For an index of original sources for the material found in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, see “Sources for Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” Joseph Smith Papers, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/sources-for-teachings-of-js-by-joseph-fielding-smith.

100. B. H. Roberts, “The King Follett Discourse,” Improvement Era 12, no. 3 (January 1909): 169–91.

101. Joseph Fielding Smith, The Signs of the Times: A Series of Discussions (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1942) (142 pp.).

102. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, 133–41.

103. “Lion House Social Center Organizes Many New Classes,” Deseret News, January 14, 1933, iii.

104. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 345.

105. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 312.

106. Joseph Fielding Smith, The Restoration of All Things (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1945) (334 pp.).

107. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 355–56.

108. Matthew Porter Wilcox, “The Resources and Results of the Radio, Publicity, and Mission Literature Committee: 1935–1942” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2013), 67–69.

109. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 355–56.

110. Philip L. Barlow, “Mind and Spirit in Mormon Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 236–42.

111. Joseph Fielding Smith, Man: His Origin and Destiny (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954) (563 pp.).

112. B. H. Roberts to Heber J. Grant, February 9, 1931, quoted in James B. Allen, “The Story of The Truth, the Way, the Life,” in Roberts, Truth, the Way, the Life, 692, 708.

113. Sherlock, “‘We Can See No Advantage,’” 63.

114. Sherlock, “‘We Can See No Advantage,’” 65.

115. Allen, “Story of The Truth, the Way, the Life,” 694–703.

116. Joseph Fielding Smith, “Faith Leads to a Fulness of Truth and Righteousness,” Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 21, no. 4 (October 1930): 147–49.

117. Allen, “Story of The Truth, the Way, the Life,” 703–6; Larson, Truth, the Way, the Life, an Elementary Treatise, li–liv.

118. Sherlock, “‘We Can See No Advantage,’” 70–71.

119. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 45.

120. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 47–49; Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 97.

121. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 47–48.

122. Jeffrey E. Keller, “Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair,” Dialogue 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 83.

123. Across three chapters Smith discussed “Adam’s Place in the Earth’s Destiny,” never mentioning B. H. Roberts by name, but clearly refuting the idea that Adam was not “the first man on the earth” (see chs. 15–17).

124. It is important to note here that Smith’s anti-intellectual sentiments were not the only ones on learning, especially secular learning, to operate in Mormon thought. A Joseph Smith revelation invited Latter-day Saints to “seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).

125. Quoted in Keller, “Discussion Continued,” 81.

126. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation: Sermons and Writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, comp. Bruce R. McConkie, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954–56) (1036 pp.).

127. President David O. McKay and a pair of Apostles, Mark E. Petersen and Marion G. Romney, reported numerous errors in McConkie’s initial edition of Mormon Doctrine. The First Presidency recommended that a new edition of the book not be published and determined that all future books produced by General Authorities required the approval of the First Presidency before their publication. McKay eventually relented on a second edition of Mormon Doctrine with revisions that was released in 1966. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, 49–53.

128. See Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

129. John A. Widtsoe and Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Joseph F. Smith, Sixth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1919), vi.

130. Heber J. Grant and G. Homer Durham, Gospel Standards: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Heber J. Grant (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1941), xvii.

131. See, for example, Church News, May 2, 1931, 2; August 29, 1931, 2; and December 12, 1931, 7.

132. Smith’s general conference addresses were featured in more detail in a later volume, Take Heed to Yourselves!

133. Smith published his correspondence on a monthly basis in the Improvement Era starting in 1953. See Joseph Fielding Smith, “Your Question,” Improvement Era 56, no. 7 (July 1953): 502.

134. Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966) (1,114 pp.).

135. Gibbons, Joseph Fielding Smith, 311.

136. See, for example, “Answer to Questions,” Church News, September 23, 1933, 3, 8.

137. See Joseph Fielding Smith, “Your Question,” Improvement Era 56, no. 5 (May 1953): 310.

138. Smith’s father, Joseph F. Smith, was one of the founding editors of the Improvement Era. See Improvement Era 1, no. 1 (November 1897).

139. See Improvement Era 56, no. 6 (June 1953): 380.

140. Joseph F. Smith, “Editor’s Table. Congress and the ‘Mormons,’” and “Questions and Answers,” Improvement Era 6, no. 6 (April 1903): 469–74.

141. John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations: Aids to Faith in a Modern Day, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1943).

142. Smith and Stewart, Life of Joseph Fielding Smith, 294.

143. See, for example, vol. 4, chs. 40 and 41.

144. Joseph Fielding Smith, Take Heed to Yourselves! ed. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966) (453 pp.).

145. Joseph Fielding Smith, Seek Ye Earnestly, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970) (459 pp.).

146. A published compilation of some of President Smith’s discourses was published by the Deseret News in 1971, namely, J. M. Heslop and Dell R. Van Orden, Joseph Fielding Smith: A Prophet among the People (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1971). It is unclear what role Smith had in the book’s release.

147. The “response tradition” was a “genre closely related to apologetic history,” where Mormons responded directly to critics often using scripture and exhibiting a “general tendency toward proof texting.” Walker, Whittaker, and Allen, Mormon History, 207.

148. Bowman, “James Talmage, B. H. Roberts, and Confessional History,” 77–92.

Scott D. Marianno

BYU Studies Publications