Benjamin E. Park

Today marks the official release date of Greg Prince’s long-awaited Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (University of Utah Press). I’ve been privileged to look over an advanced copy since I’m responding to a paper based on the book at Mormon History Association, and I had a hard time putting it down. For those interested in the development of New Mormon History, the LDS Church’s tango with history during the 1970s and 1980s, and the institutional dynamics of the Mormon hierarchy, this is a must-read. I’ll share a more thorough review of the book, and perhaps some poignant excerpts and issues, after MHA, but in the meantime here are a baker’s dozen worth of details that should whet your appetite.

1. To give you a perspective of the different era in which Arrington was born, his family traveled via a horse and buggy when he was a kid. (105)
2. Arrington’s life was, in a way, bookended with blessings from Mormon women: shortly after being born gravely ill he was blessed by his mother, Edna, and her friend, Hanna Bowen (10, 222); and when he was to have bypass surgery much later in life he once again received a blessing that was given by his second wife, Harriet, co-worker and friend Maureen Beecher, as well as Michael and Jan Quinn. (446) These experiences might have made him especially open to scholarship on the ritual practices of Mormon women.
3. While an undergraduate student Arrington was part of the largest college cooperative experiment during the Great Depression, which likely influenced his later scholarly focuses. (15-16)
4. When he tried to enlist during World War II he was deemed too short for the Navy and medically unfit (due to his asthma) for the Air Force. He was eventually drafted by the Army. (39)
5. While overseas during the war Arrington had the pleasure to meet the Pope. (45)
6. Though he came to be known as a historian, he received his PhD in economics, was hired as an economics professor at Utah State, and never even taught a history class before his appointment as Church Historian in 1972. This experience made him sympathetic to the many non-specialists who engage in the field of Mormon history.
7. Arrington had an article in the first issue of BYU Studies on the economic origins of Word of Wisdom governance, and its content proved so controversial that the journal avoided historical topics for a number of issues afterward. This lack of an outlet for Mormon historians led to the creation of Dialogue and, later, Journal of Mormon History. BYU Studies, of course, later returned to the historical sphere. (137)
8. Arrington was tapped to be assigned mission president to the Church’s Italy Mission in 1967 before being vetoed by Elder Ezra Taft Benson. (148)
9. Arrington had been in talks with the LDS Church and BYU for a joint appointment for a few years before being called as Church Historian. He originally expected to become an assistant historian, but a new organizational program that swept over the church in 1971 encouraged Church leadership to divest divisional responsibility off of general authorities and onto specialists. So Arrington’s appointment as Church Historian was just one of many bureaucratic changes that took place in the early 1970s.
10. During the 1960s Arrington and his colleague, George Ellsworth, applied to the National Historic Publications Commission for funding to do the Brigham Young Papers Project. The NHPC readily agreed and pledged $40,000. The Church, though, declined. A decade later, Arrington tried to resurrect the Young project, only this time as a 7-volume biography. The Church declined again. However, they agreed to support him in a one-volume biography, which became Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf), a team-oriented project that only took seven months to draft. (185, 398-400)
11. Prior to the 1970s it was Church policy to terminate a woman’s employment once she had a child. However, Maureen Beecher, an employee in the history division, with Arrington’s support, fought for her continued employment after she became pregnant. They succeeded in not only obtaining an exemption for Beecher, but also a reversal of the entire policy. (240-244)
12. Once when teaching a course on Mormon history at BYU, Arrington discovered there were at least two students who were assigned by LDS leadership to “observe” his teachings and report back. (386)
13. Prince’s biography is just the newest item in a string of Arrington coverage. Arrington originally planned for an autobiography in 1975 when he hired Rebecca Cornwall to ghost-write it, and then in 1982 when he hired Lavina Fielding Anderston to ghost-write another that covered his Church Historian years. Both resulted in biographies that were privately published. (437-439) Arrington eventually authored his own biography, Adventures of a Church Historian, that was published by the University of Illinois in 1998. Arrington sincerely feared his memoirs would lead to his excommunication, yet the final product was quite kind and pulled many punches.

These are just a few of the fascinating details in the book. I strongly recommend it.

A collection of some of the things I found interesting this week.

American History & Academy

The Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History has a call for papers for 2016/2017. I absolutely loved these meetings–they are always well attended, have good food, smart commentary, and excellent camaraderie–and I’ll honestly miss it while I’m in Texas.

The Celia Project went live. Martha Jones spoke at Mizzou a few months ago, so I’ve been looking forward to this. It should be a great resource not only for those interested in race, sex, and law in America’s past, but also for potential pedagogical tools in the classroom.

Flora Fraser Wins the 2016 George Washington Prize for her book, The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love” (Knopf).

The Journal of American History is looking for a Visiting Assistant Professor/Assistant Editor. Looks like a great gig.

Seth Perry did an incisive review of Origins of American Religious Nationalism, a book I also reviewed in W&MQ, and he makes broader points about “rushing” to make a point.

American Culture/Politics

Gawker has Pulitzer-worthy reporting on Trump’s hair weave.

Mormon History

Matt Bowman did a fabulous interview with Stephen Taysom about his biography-in-progress of Joseph F. Smith. Steve is one of the great thinkers in Mormon history, not to mention a superb writer. The book should be great.

I also did an interview with Thomas Simpson about his forthcoming book on American universities and the making of modern Mormonism.

Mormon Interests

Paul Huntsman comes close to finalizing his purchase of the Salt Lake Tribune. This is a great move that will solidify the Trib’s existence and maintain its independence. (For an example, see their continuing coverage of the BYU rape scandal.)

I already highlighted it here, but make sure to read Kristine Haglund on the BYU rape issue.

The best podcast in the Mormon world, Blair Hodges’s Maxwell Institute Podcast, interviewed genius Marilynne Robinson.

Michael Austin is my favorite Mormon commentator, whether he writes in a serious or humorous vein.

Still trying to figure out what I’d like to post here, but a fun and infrequent series might be “New Book Arrivals” to brag about my recent purchases. 

I’m really excited about all these books, for different reasons. Saltwater Frontier won the Bancroft, and I have a goal of reading all books that reach that designation. Nick Guyatt, who wrote Bind Us Apart, was hired at Cambridge just as I was leaving; his book on Providentialism is one of my favorites, and his new book covers a very important topic. Like many interested in American intellectual history, I’ve long-awaited Kloppenberg’s time on democracy, and the 200 pages or so I’ve read thus far have been great. And Wilentz is always smart and provocative, even if I don’t always agree with him. (I concur with the main gist of this review, save the unfair swipes in the first two paragraphs.)  

Thomas Simpson is an instructor at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy and has written a couple of great articles on Mormonism and higher education during the second half of the nineteenth century (see here and here), which was based on his dissertation at the University of Virginia. Well, that dissertation is now a book to be published by UNC Press, and from what I hear it’s a great one. Here is the press’s page for it, where you can read more about the project. Anyway, if you pre-order the book through the press right now and use 01DAH40 as a promo code, you can get 40% off. I’ve already done it, and I recommend you do as well. This will be a book for anyone with interest in American religious history.

I did a Q&A with Thomas Simpson over at Juvenile Instructor.

One of the things I hope this blog will do is be a repository for reading/writing assignments I’ve used in classes. This last semester I taught an 18th Century Atlantic Revolutions Class where we focused on the American, French, and Haitian Revolts. (I contemplated adding the revolutions within the Spanish Empire, but decided against it for a number of reasons. Mostly because we already had too much to cover.) The class had both undergraduate and graduate students, so I had to produce two different outlines. I’ll give an outline of the writing assignments and group projects at another time, but below are readings.

Undergraduate Students

• Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative Perspective (NYU Press, 2009).
• David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2004).
• Lynn Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford, 1996).
• Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Holt, 2007).
• David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2014).
• Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture (Vintage, 2007).

Graduate Students

• R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, updated edition (Princeton University Press, 2014).
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015).
• Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015).
• David Andress, 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
• William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2015).
• David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press, 2010).
• Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (UNC Press, 2015).