That last bastion of privacy—our personal diaries—has now been turned into a “program.” From the pulpit, we are admonished to keep diaries; we are treated to snatches of personal diaries in sacrament meeting, we are…
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…
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…
On a snowy evening, Gerard de Valois stepped from a tram near Quai Marcellis in the Belgian city of Liege. He positioned his hat more firmly, tucked his scarf tightly into the collar of his…
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…
There is no exaltation in the kingdom of God without the fulness of the priesthood. . . . Every man who is faithful and will receive these [temple] ordinances and blessings obtains a fulness of…
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.