Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons On The Page, Stage, And Screen, Mark T. Decker, Michael Austin

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In a time when Mormons appear to have larger roles in everything from political conflict to television shows and when Mormon-related topics seem to show up more frequently in the news, eight scholars take a close look at Mormonism in popular media: film, television, theater, and books.

Some authors examine specific works, including the Tony-winning play Angels in America, the hit TV series Big Love, and the bestselling books Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Others consider the phenomena of Mormon cinema and Mormon fiction; the use of the …

Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence Of Helen, Owen, And Avery Woodruff, Lu Ann Faylor Snyder, Phillip A. Snyder

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These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham "Owen" Woodruff was a young polygamous Mormon apostle, and the son of LDS President Wilford Woodruff, who is remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, a divinely-inspired call for the termination of plural marriage. The Woodruff Manifesto eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff, himself married to Helen May Winters, contracted a secretive second marriage …

The Mormon Passage Of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe For Zion, Ronald G. Watt

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Nineteenth century Mormonism was a frontier religion with roots so entangled with the American experience as to be seen by some scholars as the most American of religions and by others as a direct critique of that experience. Yet it was also a missionary religion that through proselytizing quickly gained an international, if initially mostly Northern European, makeup. This mix brought it a roster of interesting characters: frontiersmen and hardscrabble farmers; preachers and theologians; dreamers and idealists; craftsmen and social engineers. Although the Mormon elite soon took on, as elites do, a rather fixed, dynastic character, the social origins of …

Jesus In America, Claudia Gould

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Claudia Gould draws on fieldwork she conducted, as an anthropologist, in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.

Exposé Of Polygamy: A Lady's Life Among The Mormons, Fanny Stenhouse

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After the 1872 publication of Exposé of Polygamy, Fanny Stenhouse became a celebrity in the cultural wars between Mormons and much of America. An English convert to Mormonism, she had grown disillusioned with the Mormon Church and with polygamy, which her husband practiced before associating with a circle of dissident Utah intellectua ls and merchants. Stenhouse's critique of plural marriage, Brigham Young, and Mormonism was also a sympathetic look at Utah's people and honest recounting of her life. Before long, she created a new edition, titled Tell It All, which ensured her notoriety in Utah and popularity elsewhere but turned …

Mormonism's Last Colonizer: The Life And Times Of William H. Smart, William B. Smart

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By the early twentieth century, the era of organized Mormon colonization of the West from a base in Salt Lake City was all but over. One significant region of Utah had not been colonized because it remained in Native American hands--the Uinta Basin, site of a reservation for the Northern Utes. When the federal government decided to open the reservation to white settlement, William H. Smart--a nineteenth-century Mormon traditionalist living in the twentieth century, a polygamist in an era when it was banned, a fervently moral stake president who as a youth had struggled mightily with his own sense of …

Religion, Politics, And Sugar: The Mormon Church, The Federal Government, And The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907 To 1921, Matthew C. Godfrey

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One famous target of Progressive Era attempts to rein in monopolistic big business was the eastern Sugar Trust. Less known is how federal regulators also tried to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West by going after the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a business supported and controlled by the Latter-day Saints church and run by Mormon authorities. As sugar beet agriculture boomed, the Mormon church's involvement led directly to monopolistic practices by Utah-Idaho Sugar and to federal investigations. Church leaders encouraged members, a majority population in much of the intermountain West, to patronize the company exclusively, as suppliers and …

Polygamy On The Pedernales: Lyman Wight's Mormon Villages In Antebellum Texas, 1845-1858, Melvin C. Johnson

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In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.'s murder in 1844, his following splintered. Most of the membership ultimately followed Brigham Young to Utah, but smaller groups coalesced around other Mormon leaders. A number of these later combined to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ. Among those were most of the remaining followers of a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly …

The Marrow Of Human Experience, William A. Wilson

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Composed over several decades, the essays here are remarkably fresh and relevant. They offer instruction for the student just beginning the study of folklore as well as repeated value for the many established scholars who continue to wrestle with issues that Wilson has addressed. As his work has long offered insight on critical mattersn--nationalism, genre, belief, the relationship of folklore to other disciplines in the humanities and arts, the currency of legend, the significance of humor as a cultural expression, and so forth--so his recent writing, in its reflexive approach to narrative and storytelling, illuminates today's paradigms. Its notable autobiographical …

Junius And Joseph: Presidential Politics And The Assassination Of The First Mormon Prophet, Robert S. Wicks, Fred R. Foister

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"Junius and Joseph examines Joseph Smith's nearly forgotten [1844] presidential bid, the events leading up to his assassination on June 27, 1844, and the tangled aftermath of the tragic incident. It... establishes that Joseph Smith's murder, rather than being the deadly outcome of a spontaneous mob uprising, was in fact a carefully planned military-style execution. It is now possible to identify many of the key individuals engaged in planning his assassination as well as those who took part in the assault on Carthage jail. And furthermore, this study presents incontrovertible evidence that the effort to remove the Mormon leader from …

Building The "Goodly Fellowship Of Faith", Frederick Quinn

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As this critical, independent history, which ends with the ordination of one of the first women bishops in the nation, shows, Utah Episcopalians have had, despite small numbers, a remarkably eventful and significant history, which included complex relations with Mormons and Native Americans, early experience of women and homosexuals in the ministry, and a fascinating set of bishops. Among the latter were Daniel Tuttle, a leading figure in Episcopal history; Christian socialist and Social Gospel proponent Frank Spencer Spalding; and Paul Jones, forced to resign because of his pacifism during WWI. Frederick Quinn, an Episcopal priest and historian, is adjunct …

One Side By Himself: The Life And Times Of Lewis Barney, 1808-1894, Ronald O. Barney

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"What an astonishing life and what a remarkable biography. Lewis Barney's sojourn on the hard edge of the American frontier is a forgotten epic. Not only does this book tell of an amazing personal odyssey from his birth in upstate New York in 1808 to his death in Mancos, Colorado, in 1894, but Barney's tale represents a living evocation of some of the most significant themes in American history. Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the frontier shaped our national character, but Lewis Barney's life stands as a testament to the real impact of the westering experience on a man and …

The History Of Louisa Barnes Pratt, George Ellsworth

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In her memoir, and 1870s revision of her journal and diary, Louisa Barnes Pratt tells of childhood in Massachusetts and Canada during the War of 1812, and independent career as a teacher and seamstress in New England, and her marriage to the Boston seaman Addison Pratt.

Converting to the LDS Church, the Pratts moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, from where Brigham Young sent Addison on the first of the long missions to the Society Islands that would leave Louisa on her own. As a sole available parent, she hauled her children west to Winter Quarters, to Utah in 1848, to California, …