Despite the recent boom in academic Mormon studies, there has continued to be a gap. History and ancient studies, theology and polemical apologetics, and scriptural interpretation and application have dominated the scene, while relatively little work has been done in … Continued
This book is a refreshing and provocative variation from most books on Mormonism because it neither attempts to prove the ultimate truth or falsity of the religion nor is it devoted to the sensational aspects of it. It is not … Continued
Latter-day Saints in Washington, D.C., is edited by Brigham Young University professors of Church history and doctrine Kenneth L. Alford, Lloyd D. Newell, and Alexander L. Baugh. This volume collects essays written by the faculty of the Department of Church … Continued
Joseph Smith (1805–1844) inhabited a visionary world and belonged to a visionary family.1 At about age twelve, he began to worry about his soul and started searching the Bible. As he compared the scriptures to the Christian denominations where he … Continued
Since its founding in 1830, the Church has had three official names (not including the fine-tuning of punctuation that came with the final refinement). Initially, it was the “Church of Christ,” then “The Church of the Latter Day Saints,” and then—as with so many other aspects of the Restoration—a line- upon-line process led to the name “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” This article charts the refining process by presenting a timeline of the Church’s official and unofficial names and explores the nature of human and divine collaboration along the way. In addition to divine revelation, we also see in the construction of the name of our faith the imprints of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, Brigham Young, Joseph F. Smith, and others.
The publication of this one-volume survey history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an event of some moment, long-awaited. No doubt the book will be of influence in the long line of Mormon historiography. The amount of work required for such a coverage is enormous, the task of synthesis is overwhelming, and there are more difficulties for the historian than any reader or writer of monographic history can imagine.
The fresh title notwithstanding, Melville’s Conflict and Compromise: The Mormons in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Politics is not a new work. A sketchy survey of the political events in early territorial Utah has been added, but in substance, this book is a reprint—apparently from the very same plates—of the author’s Highlights in Mormon Political History which was originally published in the Brigham Young University Merrill Monograph Series in 1967. I was not aware that this was the case when I agreed to prepare a review for BYU Studies, and this unanticipated duplication places me in a somewhat awkward position since I reviewed the work in its earlier form for Dialogue (3 [Winter 1968]: 103–104). Upon discovery of this situation, my first impulse was to suggest that, because the new book is essentially the same as the earlier one, this fact could be noted and the readers directed to the earlier reviews of the work. However, as I reread the account of “The Mormon in the Frontier Politics of Iowa” and the discussion of “The Mormons and the Compromise of 1850” and read the added section on “The Infant Steps of Territorial Government” for the first time, I realized that 1968 assessments of Professor Melville’s work will not serve in 1975. For one thing, the world of Mormon history has changed since this monograph was prepared. For another, a virtual revolution in methodology has occurred in the whole general area of political history in the intervening years. The standards by which a work of this nature must be judged have changed dramatically, and—evaluated with modern criteria in mind—Conflict and Compromise simply fails to measure up as useful scholarship.
The second (and longest) section of the book purports to explain, for example, how and why the U.S. Congress provided the Mormons in the Great Basin with a territorial rather than a state government. Yet the analysis is entirely based on Mormon sources and the public debates recorded in the journals of the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. The author has made no real effort to place the question in the full context of the complicated national political situation of the time, and has been content, instead, to narrate the story almost precisely as John M. Bernhisel, the Saints’ Washington lobbyist, related it to the LDS Church Presidency. Moreover, while Holman Hamilton’s Prologue to Conflict was published in 1964, no reference is made to this standard work on the Compromise of 1850. Also, no notice is taken of Thomas B. Alexander’s Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Voting Returns in the United States House of Representatives, 1836–1860 or any of the other words in which congressional roll calls have been “scaled” or “clustered,” even though the importance of roll-call analysis in the explanation of the behavior of legislative bodies has been amply demonstrated.
Mormon historian Leonard J. Arrington addresses a literature session of the 1973 Mormon Arts Festival. The evolution of the public perception of Mormonism, divided into three periods: (1) Joseph Smith’s era and reports of his character, (2) after the LDS settlement in the Great Basin, and (3) from the 1930s on, when people began to realize that Mormons are honest, hardworking, and friendly. Perceptions of the Church have not always been positive. During the Great Basin phase of the Church, anti-Mormon literature created its own image of Mormons as terroristic, degraded, and motivated by base passions. Arrington calls for a rejuvenation of carrying the gospel forward by creating a positive image of the modern Church through literary endeavors.
This is a review of reviews, a sort of postmortem. Not that the book is dead. It is very much alive! But there have been so many reviews of this book since it was published by the Michigan State University Press in 1967 that to now write a review would seem almost like picking the bones of last year’s Thanksgiving turkey. All of the reviewers seem thankful that Klaus Hansen wrote the book and seem to be agreed that its publication constitutes a definite contribution to Mormon Americana.
From Thucydides to Carl Becker and from Vico to R. C. Collingwood, historians and philosophers of history have debated the question of teleology, or purpose, in the historical process. The Latter-day Saints approach the issue with a religious weltanschauung fairly saturated … Continued
