A couple weeks ago I wrote about a recent and laughable book that claims George Washington was a proto-Mormon. (See the post here.) Given the echo chamber that is my social network, most of the readers and responders agreed with me that the books’ claims are silly, though I hope it was clear that I think there’s an important cultural tension beneath that silly surface. Anyway, there were a few commenters at the end of the thread (and a few on social media) who asked me to actually engage the book’s arguments rather than dismiss them. I’d respond by saying 1) I’m lazy, and 2) there are literally two centuries of scholarship that this author ignores, so I’ll just rely on them. Anyway, Ardis Parshall is a much more patient and thorough historian than I am, so she did an excellent take-down of one of the Washington claims at her blog, Keepapitchinin. (See here.) Here’s a good summary:

Provenance, people. Provenance matters.

Basic honesty matters, too. You damage the Latter-day Saint cause by promulgating unsupportable nonsense like this. What non-Mormon with a modicum of sense is going to listen to missionaries tell about Moroni visiting Joseph Smith, after this? What are you doing to the future faith of Latter-day Saints who think they feel the Spirit testifying to this thrilling nonsense but who later find out how unworthy it is? How likely are they to trust their impressions the next time?

By the way, if you are interested in Mormon history–or, really, history in general–you should be a frequenter of Ardis’s blog.

Sadly, it is evident Deseret Book is still going to promote this book at all costs, which will further devalue their credibility as a publisher. A shame.

Apparently @DeseretBook didn’t read my @ByCommonConsent post. Front cover of their catalogue! What a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/h5dpf1vbpr

— Benjamin Park (@BenjaminEPark) May 12, 2016

Also, the image for this post comes from my old pal, Jon McNaughton (see here), and depicts the same problematic theme. That guy’s the best.

The last two weeks saw four excellent new books in Mormon history, two each from University of Utah and Signature, arrive that deserve attention. I’ll probably have brief overviews of them sometime soon, but at the moment I’ll just highlight their titles and summaries:

Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (University of Utah Press). There are a lot of edited collections out there, especially in Mormon history, but a majority of them fall by the wayside within a year or two, never to be heard from again. (There’s a reason most academic presses are turning away from multi-author volumes, save for rare exceptions.) Yet this is one edited collection that I really think will stick–its collection of authors, diversity of disciplines, and coverage of topics make it a crucial book for anyone interested in Mormon women’s history. I’d venture to say it’s the most important multi-author work on the topic since the famous Women and Authority in 1992. I’ve only read about half of the chapters thus far, but they have all been excellent. I was also in attendance for the conference upon which this volume is based and can attest to the energy and excitement that was involved.

Speaking of multi-author volumes, Patrick Mason, ed., Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century (University of Utah), is also the result of a conference. This event was a festschrift in honor of Armand Mauss, one of the great scholars of Mormon history, and it takes a multi-disciplinary look at the future of the field. While history has long been the premier discipline within the subfield of Mormon studies, it has long been hoped that new approaches would be quickly added. The papers in this volume point to a number of possibilities, including with sociology, autobiography, and ethnography. Still heavily history, of course, but at least hints to a non-history-centric focus. It reminds me of Quincy Newell and Eric Mason’s New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), which performed a similar work. The two volumes compliment each other in nice ways.

Finally, Signature Books offered two new volumes. The first, Island Adventures: The Hawaiian Mission of Francis A. Hammond, 1851-1865, edited by John Hammond, offers an acute overview of an important early missionary focus; I’ve had an ARC of the volume sitting on my desk for a month, and the few times I’ve dove in have rewarded me with rich textual excerpts. I look forward to more exploration. The other one is a book long-awaited in MHA’s community: Martha Bradley-Evans’s Nauvoo-era biographical study of Joseph Smith, Glorious in Persecution: Joseph Smith, American Prophet. Part of a trilogy Smith-Pettitt commissioned quite some time ago, it is the first of the three parts to appear. (The Van Wagoner, Natural Born Seer, which covers Smith’s life through 1830, will appear in a couple months.) I’ve already given Glorious in Persecution a quick read-through, and am now giving it a much deeper look since it overlaps with my current Nauvoo project. I’ll probably write a more in-depth review of it later, but there are a lot of things I love in it (her theoretical approach to Smith is long over-due and provocative) and a few frustrations (her reliance on problematic sources and lack of engagement with recent scholarship). A must-read, though, for those interested in the Nauvoo period.

The fantastic Jana Riess kindly agreed to host some of my musings on Alex Cooper’s book Saving Alex, which was co-authored with Joanna Brooks. You can read my thoughts on how the book demonstrates the “safe spaces” of conservative anti-homosexuality here.

I strongly recommend the book. Alex comes across as a courageous figure, and Joanna Brooks makes sure the prose sparkles. It is very readable and shares a very important and compelling message for today.

As part of my work as a professor, I hope to use this blog as a platform to share my sporadic thoughts on scholarship, current events, and the intersections between the two. While I already contribute to a number of blogs, including The Junto, Juvenile Instructor, and By Common Consent (though I’m currently emeritus there), and I still plan to post at those locations, there are often times I have ideas that are not fully fleshed out, are quite brief, or are otherwise more fitting for a personal space. I may post frequently, like a few times a week, or I may go through many stretches of inactivity. We’ll see.

I envision this space to be an extension of my work in the classroom, and I’ll frequently be posting things directly to my current and former students. Additionally, I’ll also be highlighting recent books, articles, and presentations that have piqued my interest. And to be honest, I may frequently change my mind about my primary audience, or give up a blog entirely. Who knows!

At the very least, I’ll try to reach the standard of “Creed Thoughts.”