After decades of neglect by scholars, theologians, and even rank and-file Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon may be finally getting its due. Recently, several books have under scored the importance of this controversial work…
Glen Leonard’s long-awaited history of Nauvoo is friendly history at its finest. It gently questions some deeply held beliefs about the Saints’ tumultuous sojourn at the fringes of western Illinois. The writing is read able…
Americans may be on the eve of a preemptive attack on a foreign country, ostensibly to protect ourselves from potential future attacks. Our nemesis, Saddam Hussein, is known to be evil, having gassed his own…
In April of 2001 I directed ten of my students in an hour-and-fifteen minute workshop production of the rough beginnings of a play I’d writ ten. I’d been immersed in research and writing for eight…
Recently, Latter-day Saint artists and writers in New York City have been searching for ways to recognize one another. I don’t mean recognize in the sense of honoring, but recognize as in encountering one another’s…
Over the course of some thirteen years I was involved in an intense “affair” with a woman other than my wife. My long-term affair with Fawn McKay Brodie, literary in nature, involved the research and…
On the long tether of a day in June
Beyond the Zion swamps, the prisoned palms
Of four men opened toward a promised land.
And yet, below the shadows of limestone
Joseph thought again, I am going
Like a lamb to the slaughter.
Dialogue 35.3 (Fall 2003):127–168
DURING THE PAST FEW DECADES, a number of LDS scholars have developed various “limited geography” models of where the events of the Book of Mormon occurred. These models contrast with the traditional western hemisphere model, which is still the most familiar to Book of Mormon readers.
This paper will examine the vision or purported vision of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith on the night of 21-22 September 1823, announcing the location of the gold plates containing the Book of Mormon. The 1839 history of Joseph Smith contains by far the most detailed description of the vision, but there are details in this account which could not have occurred prior to 1834. The process used here (as in New Testament “form criticism”) will be to distinguish the original historic core of the visionary narrative and experience from later anachronistic redactions. Finally, if Joseph Smith did see what he claimed to see on that night, what does that represent—a dream, a representation of a being actually in his room, an altered state of sight, etc.?
Historians have long believed that history does not consist simply of recounting the past according to the Rankean ideal of telling it “as it really was.” The process of researching, selecting, and emplotting historical evidence within a narrative structure is often idiosyncratic, and may be employed to further a host of goals. Within communities, history represents a way of appropriating the past in order to serve the needs of the present. Maurice Halbwachs’s work emphasizes the role history plays as the “collective memory” of a community. Halbwachs argues that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by the people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” This process involves the retention of useful historical emplotment points coupled with the suppression of those “facts” which threaten to undermine a community’s structures.