In a June 1843 public meeting, Joseph Smith was asked why “gathering . . . the people of God” was such an important principle. He responded with this lively bit of wisdom: “A man never…
The water was black around our knees. Bamboo surrounded and overlooked us. It was so quiet in the mist and the dark green stalks that the sound of our legs moving was an intrusion. Water…
Those of us who study material culture frequently use “rootedness,” which is the quality of an object or a structure when it is fixed in association with a geographical place. For example, a group of…
For the first and only time, my wife sent my father a letter. I have since retrieved the letter and have it still. It is two deckle sheets neatly typed on the electric portable I…
I well remember the spring and summer of 1965 when Gene England, Wesley Johnson, Paul Salisbury, Joseph Jeppson, and I got together to explore the idea of an unofficial Mormon publication. There were lively conversations culminating in a meeting at the Johnson home on July 11, where we voted to incorporate as a non-profit under the laws of Utah. The History Department at Stanford allowed us to use a portion of Wes’s office as our base—no rent, no utilities to pay. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought was the result. A lot has been written about that early history. However, there are a couple of things I see now that I didn’t clearly grasp then. First, I, for one, was a thoroughly pre-correlation Mormon. Second, the Church is not immune from the sober lessons of history.
In the spirit of Eugene England, I would like this review to read something like a personal essay. So I’ll start with something personal. I’m writing this review for two important reasons, one noble, and…
Her ticket is at will-call. She needs no help finding their seats, but Tom repeatedly cranes his neck to check the doors at the back of the hall. He likes it when she emerges from…
With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now underway, it is appropriate to reexamine that campaign’s origins, conduct, significance, and historiography. This article’s purpose is to stimulate such probing. I hope to do so through the story of my own research and conclusions about the war over the past half-century—one-third of the period since President James Buchanan and Governor Brigham Young came into armed conflict during 1857-58.
Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage.
In April 1993, President Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, international dignitaries, and Holocaust survivors celebrated the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the monument is one of the most expensive additions to the federal museum system. Its mission, described by the museum’s project director Michael Berenbaum, is to “memorialize the victims of Nazism by providing an exhaustive historical narrative of the Holocaust and to present visitors with an object lesson in the ethical ideals of American political culture by presenting the negation of those ideals.”