Stephen Taysom

A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph Smith’s Legacy, Polygamy, and the Creation of Mormon Public Memory, 1852-2002

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. 

Dissent Without Definition | John Sillito and Susan Staker, eds., Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters

All good history is as much about the present as it is about the past. Sillito and Staker’s volume, which includes biographical sketches of dissenters ranging widely across the 180-year history of the LDS church,…

Twilight and Dawn: Turn-of-the-Century Mormonism Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder, eds. Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899–1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff

Response to Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899–1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff that contains letter correspondence between Apostle Owen Woodruff and his wives after Woodruff’s father issued the Manifesto.

Making Visible the Hand of Ritual: Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842–1845: A Documentary History; Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845–1846: A Docu

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

Review: Reid L. Neilson, ed. In the Whirlpool: The Pre-Manifesto Letters of President Wilford Woodruff to the William Atkin Family, 1885–1890

The Last Memory: Joseph F. Smith and Lieux de Mémoire in Late Nineteenth-Century Mormonism