Hey everyone. Two notes concerning my attempts at blogging: It’s not dead! I’m ready to dig back in, including both book reviews and short essays. It’s migrating! I’ve decided to streamline things and move everything to my professional website, benjaminepark.com. If you go there and click on the menu, you’ll find the blog. Here is…
Dissecting Mormonism’s Founding Documents
The field of Mormon history has always been inundated with an obsession with documents. There are multiple reasons for this. For one, the LDS tradition itself possessed an injunction in an early revelation that “a record shall be kept among you,” which resulted in the Saints compiling loads and loads of significant texts since its…
The Significance of Leonard Arrington’s Diaries
The legacy of Leonard Arrington is familiar to anyone who studies Mormon history. Author of the classic monograph Great Basin Kingdom, Arrington was the known as the founder of the New Mormon History movement as well as the first academic to be appointed the official historian for the LDS Church. His decade-long tenure in the Church…
William Smith’s “The Plural Marriage Revelation” and Nauvoo’s Legacy
It all started with a domestic dispute. Okay, so it was more complex than that, and there were certainly many layers behind the origins of Joseph Smith’s polygamy revelation, but for the sake of my point let’s just say one of the most controversial documents in Mormonism’s history was meant to solve a marital spat….
Review: RoseAnn Benson, ALEXANDER CAMPBELL AND JOSEPH SMITH
Historians of early Mormonism have long noted the connection between Joseph Smith and a contemporary restorationist, Alexander Campbell. Both lived in antebellum America, both sought to restore a primitive form of Christianity, and both based their religion on (what they believed to be) a literalistic interpretation of the Bible. And unlike other theological figures sometimes…
Interview on Contemporary Mormonism
For those interested, I was interviewed by William Black for the website “Meaning of Life.” The discussion touched on modern Mormonism, the transition of LDS leadership, and other topics related to the modern Mormon tradition. You can find their website here, and I’ve embedded the video below.
Review: James Lewis, THE BURR CONSPIRACY
The Broadway musical Hamilton did a lot for the protagonist Alexander Hamilton, but little for his nemesis Aaron Burr. Despite the valiant effort of historians like Nancy Isenberg, the victor of the 1804 duel was now seen as the villain of one of America’s greatest rivalries. But what’s fascinating is that one of the most intriguing…
Classes and Syllabi, Spring 2018
Things have been quiet around here as the last few weeks have been a blur. But now that the semester has commenced I hope to return to a more standard schedule, including my Wednesday book reviews. I’m excited for the Spring semester to finally start, although it was postponed again this week as a surprise…
New Article: “Kings and Queens of the Kingdom: Gendering the Mormon Theological Narrative”
A few days before I left Texas for the holiday break, I received a copy of a new edited volume: Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography, edited by Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flake, Keith Erekson, and Lisa Olsen Tait. The volume began with a conference held at BYU and Salt Lake City a couple years ago that tried…
Things I wrote in 2017
Continuing a tradition from last year, this is my attempt to categorize everything I wrote in the last twelve months. It’s been a good year! Articles: “The Bonds of Union: Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Defining the Nation in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies 15:2 (Spring 2017): 382-408. “The Angel of Nullification: Imagining Disunion…
Review: Moss and Baden, BIBLE NATION
Within a few minutes’ walk from the United States Capital in Washington DC, a visitor might stumble upon an impressive eight-story structure dedicated to “reacquaint[ing] the world with the book that helped make it.” The Museum of the Bible opened just last month after several years of anticipation. In some ways, it is similar to…
When A Woman Served as an Official Witness for Mormonism’s First Baptism for the Dead
Vienna Jaques was mounted on a horse when she witnessed Mormonism’s first vicarious baptism. Jaques had already witnessed much in her life. Born in Boston the same year that America’s founders wrote the Constitution, she was in her forties when she embraced the LDS faith. Giving up her home and comfortable living to join the…
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