I share this essay by esteemed scholar David Blight every year on Memorial Day because it is so important. Go read it. Here is a taste: The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the…
Month: May 2016
13 Surprising Facts from Greg Prince’s Biography of Leonard Arrington
Today marks the official release date of Greg Prince’s long-awaited Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (University of Utah Press). I’ve been privileged to look over an advanced copy since I’m responding to a paper based on the book at Mormon History Association, and I had a hard time putting it down. For those…
Weekly Links, 5/29/2016
A collection of some of the things I found interesting this week. American History & Academy The Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History has a call for papers for 2016/2017. I absolutely loved these meetings–they are always well attended, have good food, smart commentary, and excellent camaraderie–and I’ll honestly miss it while I’m in…
New Book Arrivals, May 2016
Still trying to figure out what I’d like to post here, but a fun and infrequent series might be “New Book Arrivals” to brag about my recent purchases. I’m really excited about all these books, for different reasons. Saltwater Frontier won the Bancroft, and I have a goal of reading all books that reach that designation….
Pre-Order Tom Simpson’s Book on Mormonism and Universities Now!
Thomas Simpson is an instructor at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy and has written a couple of great articles on Mormonism and higher education during the second half of the nineteenth century (see here and here), which was based on his dissertation at the University of Virginia. Well, that dissertation is now a book to be published…
Readings from Age of Revolutions, Spring 2016
One of the things I hope this blog will do is be a repository for reading/writing assignments I’ve used in classes. This last semester I taught an 18th Century Atlantic Revolutions Class where we focused on the American, French, and Haitian Revolts. (I contemplated adding the revolutions within the Spanish Empire, but decided against it…
Junto Roundtable on Atlantic Archives
When I originally envisioned The Junto Blog, I wanted it to be a place where junior academics could come and share research tales, archival experiences, disciplinary thoughts, and other fun-but-important aspects of academic life. The tone, as I told the first contributors, was to be an engaged but informal discussion at a lunch table. To…
Kristine Haglund on BYU’s Rape Culture
Nearly two months ago, By Common Consent posted a recap of a rape awareness meeting that took place at BYU where university administrators admitted that they investigate students who report rape for possible honor code violations. (“We do not apologize,” she said, for holding students to a particular standard.) The implication being that many assume…
Kinder Institute’s Shawnee Trail Conference
Last weekend I attended my last Kinder Institute event of my postdoctoral tenure: the Shawnee Trail Conference. You can read the program at this link; it was a mixture of history and political science papers, and the participants ranged from doctoral students to tenured professors. We even had a lunch-time presentation by Andrew Porwancher on his…
George Washington’s Secret Mormon Life
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…
New Books in Mormon History
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…
Alex Cooper’s Book and the “Safe Spaces” of Anti-Homosexuality
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…
Professor Park's Blog 