Marvin S. Hill

The Manipulation of History | Can We Manipulate the Past? By Fawn Brodie

Dialogue 5.3 (Fall 1970): 96–99
Marvin S Hill was responding to Fawn Brodie’s lecture at the Hotel Utah in 1970 called “Can We Manipulate the Past?” Her point in giving it was she was claiming that the people in charge only emphasize the points of history that fit their gains. She then compared that to Church Leaders only focusing on Joseph Smith’s early attitudes towards slavery, but then she claimed that Church Leaders didn’t focus on the fact that in the future he changed his mind regarding Slavery and became more against it, kind of like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson. Marvin S Hill kept mentioning that she overlooked certain aspects.

An Uncertain Voice in the Wilderness | F. Mark McKiernan, The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness: Sidney Rigdon, Religious Reformer

When so many biographies of early Mormons are made immaculate (and superficial) by filial piety, it borders on the tragic when an historian seeking to write an objective life of Sidney Rigdon fails in many…

Brodie Revisited: A Reappraisal | Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet

For more than a quarter century Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History has been recognized by most professional American historians as the standard work on the life of Joseph Smith and perhaps the most…

A Note on Joseph Smith’s First Vision and Its Import in the Shaping of Early Mormonism

Some years ago Sidney E. Mead, then professor of American church history at the University of Chicago, argued that the two live movements of the 18th century which shaped American Christianity were pietism and rationalism.[1]…

The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation

Ever since Fawn Brodie wrote No Man Knows My History in 1946 and emphatically denied that there was any valid evidence that Joseph Smith experienced a visitation from the Father and the Son in 1820,…

The “New Mormon History” Reassessed in Light of Recent Book on Joseph Smith and Mormon Origins

In 1959, while a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I wrote a review of the historiography of Mormonism for Church History which incorporated the major books and articles from 1832 to 1959 in…

The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation

By Any Standard, A Remarkable Book: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman with the assistance of Jed Woodworth