DiaBLOGue

The first group of Welsh converts to Mormonism arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 26 October 1849 after a voyage of more than eight months. They had buried more than one-fifth of their number…

Late in the nineteenth century, thousands of Indians resentful of reservation life gathered in groups to chant and dance themselves into hypnotic trances until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some Plains Indians, while shuffling steps to…

The captivity narrative is one of the oldest literary genres of the New World: some 1,000 examples survive from the sixteenth century. It is also one of the earliest forms of popular literature in the…

My parents grew up conditioned toward racial prejudice—as did most Americans, including Mormons, through their generation and into part of mine. But something touched my father in his early life and grew constantly in him until he and my mother were moved at mid-life gradually to consecrate most of their life’s earnings from then on to help Lamanites.

Spencer Kimball wrote in his journal in 1951, on the occasion of David O. McKay’s becoming president, “I am positive that the appointments of His Twelve by the Lord and the subsequent deaths control the Presidency…

As a first cousin once removed from President Spencer Woolley Kimball (which doesn’t mean much in a family as extended as ours), I considered myself a sort of shirt-tail relative. That is, I was clearly…

Although I had heard his addresses in general conference and in at least one stake conference, I was first impressed with Spencer Kimball as a spiritual leader on 6 April 1954, when he spoke in…