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Creating Ethnicity In The Hydraulic Village Of The Mormon West, Charles M. Hatch
Creating Ethnicity In The Hydraulic Village Of The Mormon West, Charles M. Hatch
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
This study has looked behind the mask of nineteenth-century theocracy to see Mormons in the Great Basin creating a democratic society of regionally concentrated kin groups where obligations and rewards for individuals were increasingly determined by age and life cycle position. As generations of young adults acted together in self-interest dispersing their villages on receding frontiers, they forged a balance between competition and cooperation which merged the immediate need of individuals to establish and support families with the collective memory of their Mormon past. In so doing, they created an identity for themselves which was unique in the arid West. …