Mormon Mentality - Thoughts and Asides by Peculiar People » Cranky Goddess of Order goes to the bookstore.

By Proud Daughter of Eve

May. 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am

I keep intending to study more church history. However it’s hard to find books for several reasons. Either it’s hard to find them at all (all I can find at Chapters is “Under the Banner of Heaven,”) I can’t afford them or I’m not sure I trust them.

Recently at a second hand store I found “Faith and Betrayal” and a book about the Mormon American experience. I can’t remember the title but it appears to be a scholarly book by a man named Hansen. The introduction talks about trying to treat the history in such a way that Mormons reading it might feel a bit bruised here and there but in general would feel that their history has been treated respectfully while non-Mormons would appreciate the academic standards adhered to.

I don’t know if I trust these books. I don’t know if the second one will be clear or full of historical scholarly jargon and impenetrable sentences. As far as the issue of trust go, I speak not as someone worried about having their testimony shaken but as someone who does not suffer fools (ignorance or malicious intent or worse, both together) gladly. I want to avoid being angered because I seem to enjoy being righteously indignant and this is a trait I wish to change in myself. (Yet I blog, I know.)

Can anyone tell me about these books or maybe recommend some good places to start?

1. Edje

Wed, May. 2 @ 1:21pm

Times & Seasons has discussed reading lists a few times:

2. Edje

Wed, May. 2 @ 1:22pm

Trying again:

Times & Seasons has discussed reading lists a few times: Essential Texts in Mormon Studes.

3. DKL

Wed, May. 2 @ 3:01pm

A great place to start is Richard Buschman’s 1st bio of Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism and Leonard Arrington’s Brigham Young: American Moses.

4. endlessnegotiation

Wed, May. 2 @ 3:24pm

DKL:

Have you started drinking? Was your post of a few days ago foreshadowing your future? Or is BUSCHman a mere slip of the tongue?

5. DKL

Wed, May. 2 @ 3:29pm

typo for sure. freudian slip, maybe.

6. Justin

Wed, May. 2 @ 3:30pm

Faith and Betrayal by Sally Denton? If so, it’s not a good book. Historian Polly Aird has a review of it on amazon.com.

Tom Alexander reviewed Hansen’s book for Dialogue:

An Approach to the Mormon Past (pp. 146-148).

7. DKL

Wed, May. 2 @ 3:48pm

Alexander gives it a mixed review. I’ve found Hansen to be a credible historian. He’s very strong on finding unifying themes surrounding otherwise nebulous events in Mormon history, though historians less inclined to interpret history want to argue that the patterns he finds have exceptions to them. This is, to my mind, kind of beside the point. If you analyze the Renaissance hard enough, you can establish that it’s just like any other era, but it’s still a useful unifying construct. What do you think, Matt B? You’re actually a bona fide historian.

8. Kaimi

Wed, May. 2 @ 8:07pm

Proud Daughter of Eve,

For good online sources of secondhand books, check abebooks.com , campusi.com , or alibris.com . You can get a number of good LDS-themed books for under $10 if you’re looking for them used.

Start with Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling. It’s the updated and (very) expanded version of the earlier Bushman, which ended before Kirtland. (Downside: It’s new-ish, and so cheap used copies are harder to find.)

Some other basic cornerstones:

Prince, David O. McKay. (Also new-ish).
Arrington & Bitton, The Mormon Experience.
Newell & Avery, Mormon Enigma.
Arrington, Brigham Young.
Givens, By the Hand of Mormon.

Also, here’s a question to ask your co-blogger DKL some time:

“Dave, is there by chance a Joseph Smith bio you could tell me about that was written by a female author on whom you are strangely fixated?”

It’s definitely a question worth asking — trust me.

9. Proud Daughter of Eve

Thu, May. 3 @ 7:44am

Thank you all for the input. :) Now I’m kicking myself. I saw a copy of “By the Hand of Mormon” at a shop in London but wasn’t sure enough about it to buy it. Oh well, I saved paying UK prices for it and having to pack it.

Justin, thank you for pointing me to Polly Aird’s review of “Faith and Betrayal.” I like to have some idea of the nature of the problem with a book; I may then decide to read it anyway but it’s helpful to know how much salt to take with it. :)

For others, I recommend the biography of President and Prophet John Taylor. I believe it was written by his grandson; unfortunately I can’t recall the exact title just now. However I learned a lot about the early Utah period reading it and found the text very approachable. Others can comment on the accuracy or lack thereof but it seemed good to me.

10. Matt B

Thu, May. 3 @ 2:16pm

Sorry this took me a while – I just saw this.

Dave:

“historians less inclined to interpret history”

I’m not sure who these people are. There are certainly those historians who deny they are interpreting history (although their numbers have been dwindling steadily since around the 1920s), but at root, the evidence we find and cite is dependent upon the questions we are asking. Thus, “doing history” in some sense is more than simply finding and compiling facts. In this sense, then, genealogical databases and store purchase records are not ‘history.’ History is argument, explicitly or implicitly.

At the same time, it is true that the sort of self conscious theorizing about the past that gives rise to such constructions as “the Renaissance” or the “Americanization” period of Mormonism are generally the sign that the historiography of whatever subject has begun to mature. Mormon history has only began to hit this phase in the past couple of decades. I think it’s a sign of maturation. “Exceptions” are really just a sign of a competing theory.

Haven’t read either Hansen’s book or Alexander’s review, but if he proposes grand structures, more power to him.

11. DKL

Thu, May. 3 @ 2:50pm

I don’t mean to say that historians aren’t always interpreting history. Of course, the mere act of expressing a proposition interprets it. Once you begin to order and situate propositions into paragraphs and then into pages, the level of interpretation latent in even the most “objective” accounts is staggering.

Perhaps “interpret” is not a great word to use. I’m trying to say that Hansen always seems to me to be aggressively looking for broad-brush search for constructions that unify — like Gettysburg as a “turning-point” for the Civil War. These constructions are a double-edged sword, because their elegant simplicity also lend themselves quite easily to oversimplification. The fact is, though, that historical trends are statistical distributions and not absolute shifts, so that it’s fine to make conclusions based on a preponderance. Frankly, the points that Alexander makes mostly strike me as nit-picking (and just to be clear, Alexander is a terrific historian).

That said, I also haven’t read the book by Hansen that she’s referring to, but I’ve read his book Quest for Empire, which is, unfortunately, a bit dated at this point. (I looked it up because of the ideas that Donna Hill attributes to Hansen in her Joseph Smith Bio, and [in my opinion] she’s mistaken to attribute those ideas to him based on what I read.) But I’m responding to Alexander based on what I have perceived about his approach, attempting to qualify his mixed review.

12. Matt B

Thu, May. 3 @ 11:08pm

Just read the review, and it seems entirely representative of a frequent response to books like Hansen’s appears to be – that is, critical of the theory rather than the content. This is a fair argument to make (it almost always is, due to points we’ve already made here, and can be predicted to appear in some reviews of any theory-oriented book), and not devastating. Indeed, I think I read the review as being more favorable overall than you did. Alexander in general (based on what I’ve read of him – which does not include the WW bio – and our not-entirely-insignificant interactions) seems to me much more an institutional and policy historian than a cultural studies type of guy; I’m not surprised he’s skeptical of Hansen’s use of theory.

I also mostly agree with your second paragraph.