We Mormons put a lot of stock in the Local Boy Makes Good syndrome: we’re proud of our Osmonds, our Marriotts, our Jack Andersons, and we’re anxious to let people out there know that we…
With the exception of a handful of standouts, such as Donna Hill’s work on Joseph Smith, biographies by Mormons of Mormons have been scarcely worth the title. Often reminiscent of mimeographed Christmas letters, these books…
In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, so the old church fathers tell us, and so we realize every day as a baby dies in childbirth or a friend succumbs…
Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.
This fine book is a composite: one-third edited diaries and two-thirds biography. It provides readers, Hart descendants and historians with valuable bits of information about James Hart, LDS missionary work, emigration, St. Louis and Bear…
A few years back fifty LDS academics were asked to list the most eminent intellectuals in Mormon history. B. H. Roberts and Orson Pratt were most frequently nominated. James E. Talmage and John A. Widtsoe…
Between 1972 and 1982 I was part of the team of historians located in the Church Office Building under the direction of Leonard J. Arrington. It was a golden decade—a brief period of excitement and…
A title like that might indicate that I’m already half through. But it needed to be long to convey something of a lurid past that calls for “confessions.” “More perfect order within” suggests both the…
Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 74 – 90
This paper attempts to throw some new light on the history of this Mormon connected Egyptiana since 1848 (the close of the Mormon era in Nauvoo) and to suggest how and where more of these antiquities might be found.
Twenty-three years ago on this same occasion I gave the opening prayer in which I said: “We have met here today clothed in the black robes of a false priesthood … ” Many have asked…