This year’s conference of the John Whitmer Historical Association (JWHA) is exciting for me. It’s special in general because 2010 marks the sesquicentennial of the 1860 meeting in Amboy, Illinois, where Emma Smith and her son Joseph III affiliated with the “new organization” of Midwestern Mormons — a reorganization that ultimately became the Community of Christ. But it’s also special for me personally. Although I’ve had a hand in JWHA’s programs since 2004, this is the first year I’ve served as chair of the program committee and put the whole thing together. [Read more…]

Do you guys have one of these? I’m in the process of cleaning out the house, preparing for a move — which means that I’m going through forty years of accumulated “treasures” and associated memories. [Read more…]

According to a certificate filed with the Utah Division of Corporations & Commercial Code and obtained by the LDSgroups Yahoo Group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS Church) has called a new church President: Wendell Loy Nielson. (The FLDS Church is one of the two largest fundamentalist Mormon denominations, the other being the Apostolic United Brethren.)

President Nielson was formerly First Counselor in the FLDS First Presidency under the previous church President, Warren Steed Jeffs. Jeffs resigned his position on December 4, 2007, shortly after his sentence of ten years to life by a Utah court.

It is not yet clear whether Jeffs also resigned as Prophet of the FLDS Church or whether Nielson has been called to succeed him as Prophet. [Read more…]

This is the place, trust me.

So you’ve decided to found your own Mormon church and you want to create a Nauvoo-style theocracy by taking control of a U.S. county.

Q: What is the most vulnerable county in the United States?
A: Loving County, Texas. [Read more…]

Someone sent me a link to a lesson manual containing a fascinating and useful comparative chart that illustrates the size of Noah’s Ark in relation to other vessels. While I had always wondered how much bigger the Ark was than an Icebreaker or a Portuguese Man-of-War, it still left me wanting to know more. I did a little bit more scholarly research and I came up with my own chart that offers additional useful comparisons. [Read more…]

My uncles tease (more than half seriously) that my grandmother can’t drive past a cemetery without getting the urge to stop and look for ancestors. That’s a trait that she’s passed on to me. As we take road trips around the country, Mike and I spend a surprising amount of time in cemeteries, looking for graves — not only of ancestors, but also of figures in church history and U.S. history. All the cemeteries we visit are solemn and hallowed places, but few sites can compare to the acres and acres of orderly rows of veterans buried in America’s national cemeteries. It seems appropriate to reflect on some of these this Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, outside of the U.S.) [Read more…]

I’ve been reading Milton — which I suspect is an important background source for a number of Mormon cosmological concepts from the “war in heaven” to Arianism (Jesus as a completely separate member of the Godhead, clearly inferior to God the father). Of course, I knew that Milton is one of the greats of English literature, but in my reading I’ve been shocked at the sophistication of his portrayals of Lucifer and his allies. Paradise Lost is not a cardboard polemic about the war in heaven. Milton puts himself in the sandals of the fallen angels and creates a realistic perspective. After their ostracism and exile, the fallen legions of hell consider their options. Mammon has a particularly realistic appraisal of any potential gains that might be made in renewing the war with heaven. [Read more…]

On April 6, 1860, the prophet Joseph Smith Jr.’s widow and eldest son traveled from Nauvoo to Amboy, Illinois, to attend the general conference of a ‘new organization’ of Midwestern Latter Day Saints. Emma and Joseph Smith III were accepted as members on the strength of their original baptisms, and Joseph was then ordained prophet and president of what became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ. The majority of Midwestern Mormons, divided from 1844-1860 by schism after schism, now began to come back into communion together, in the most successful regathering of disparate groups within Mormonism to date.

To mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of this important event, the John Whitmer Historical Association will hold its September 23-26, 2010, conference near Amboy, Illinois. [Read more…]

Mike and I have just returned home from Voree, where we spent another entire week pouring through the records housed in archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite). We’re working on an institutional history of the church since the martyrdom of James Strang in 1856, the first ever composed. It’s been a fantastic experience because the Strangites have been excellent record keepers and because the church has given us unrestricted access to the archives. [Read more…]

I’ve spent the past few days editing a great little book by Janet Lisonbee, entitled Mormon Graves in Kirtland: A Biographical Dictionary of Early Saints Buried in the Kirtland Area.[1] The book covers everyone who was a church member during the early period (1830-1844) who was subsequently buried in Lake County, Ohio.

Early Mormons liked to compare the church to the stone cut without hands, rolling forward in Daniel’s vision. Historians inevitably follow the stone as it rolled from Kirtland, to Missouri, to Nauvoo, and beyond. Members who were left behind at each of those places fall out of church records — and they tend to fall out of our history too. Janet’s book will surely be most useful as a research tool for genealogists, but I’ve found it fascinating to view as a composite picture of a diverse group of early members who didn’t follow along the broad path of our mainline historical narrative.

Among the many early members buried in and around Kirtland, few had as colorful a Mormon career as Increase McGee Van Deusen. With good reason, Van Deusen’s antics are favorite fodder for guides at the Kirtland Temple. His name alone is worth the price of admission, but the stories even better than his name.[2] [Read more…]

Once upon a time in 1809, there was a man named Solomon Spaulding, who lived in what is now the town of Conneaut in Ohio’s Western Reserve district. Like so many Americans of his day, Solomon hoped to make his fortune through land speculation, and he and his brothers purchased a great deal of land in the area on credit. To maintain himself, he operated an iron forge and his wife ran a small grocery store. After a series of reversals in the land business, Solomon thought he might recoup his losses by writing the great American novel. His would be a historical fantasy — explaining the origin of the great, ancient earthworks in Ohio and elsewhere, which everyone at the time believed must have been made by some high civilization and not the “savage” American Indians of his own day. [Read more…]

These and similar questions will be explored at the third annual Restoration Studies and Sunstone Midwest Symposium, to be held April 8–9, 2010, in Independence, Missouri. Our theme is “Identities & Relationships” within the Latter Day Saint movement and Christianity as a whole. [Read more…]

The Acknowledgments section of my very first essay in Mormon history begins:

Ronald E. Romig of the Community of Christ Archives suggested this project to me when we met on April 6, 2003. From that moment to the present, his assistance in moving the project forward has been invaluable.[1]

My indebtedness to Ron is hardly unique. In a quick perusal of acknowledgments sections of books and journals in my own library, Ron’s name shows up more than a dozen times. These works individually acknowledge Ron’s contribution to their creation, but they barely scratch the surface of the overall contribution Ron has made to Mormon studies in general, both as a scholar himself, and (even more importantly) as a catalyst for scholarship.

It is this overall contribution that we need to acknowledge today, because after more than twenty years of work in the Community of Christ Archives, Ron will be taking early retirement at the end of next month — a casualty of steep budget cuts the church has been forced to make due to the current economic recession. [Read more…]

Thomas B. Marsh and his wife Elizabeth were baptized on September 3, 1830, and were therefore among the earliest members of the church. (Dan Vogel calculates that they were the 55th and 56th members, preceding all the future apostles save for William Smith and the Pratt brothers).[1] Marsh became an important early church leader and when the Council of the Twelve was organized in 1835, he was called to be one of the original members. Because he was the oldest original apostle, he became the quorum’s first president. And yet today, among Mormons, Thomas B. Marsh (if he is remembered at all) is remembered only in a story where his wife was jealous over the division of some “milk and strippings,” the fallout of which led the couple into apostasy.

History is somewhat different than the fable. [Read more…]

A call for papers for next year’s MHA — don’t let the due date creep up on you. More from MHA below… [Read more…]

I just received a copy of my grandparents’ new memoir, Fitly Framed Together: The Life and Testimony of Bob & Louise Erekson. [Edited by Ginger Hamer. Billings, Montana: Pacer Books, 2009. 377 pages. Paperback. $24.95. Photographs, illustrations, appendices, index. ISBN 978-1-4392-2912-5.]

This book has been a long time in the making! [Read more…]

The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal is the best Mormon studies journal that you’ve never read and that isn’t in your local or university library. (If you have read it and it is in your library, you’re part of a happy minority.) I’m biased, of course. Like the guy on the old Remington Microscreen Shaver commercials who believed in the product so much “he bought the company,” when I first encountered JWHA in 2003, I enjoyed the experience so much I volunteered to become one of its directors. [Read more…]