Part I of the Sunstone Classics series. Leonard Arrington served as the Church Historian beginning in 1972, establishing an unprecedented era of historical openness. In 1982, he was unceremoniously replaced and sent to BYU. He gave a speech at Sunstone in 1985, which is excerpted here. His whole speech can be found on page 36 …
Despite being an LDS publication, the first issue of the Woman’s Exponent read mostly like a run-of-the-mill woman’s journal. Eight pages long, it was filled with news (both political and sensational), medical cures, and jokes. But the Woman’s Exponent didn’t consider itself a normal woman’s journal. As one of its articles read: A woman’s journal …
The Lectures on Faith used to be part of the Doctrines and Covenants, but a strange event in Eureka, Utah, may have helped give it the boot. On 17 April 1920, James E. Talmage took a train to Eureka to investigate alleged “separatists” that were trying to re-establish the United Order. The next day, he …
Frankly, it’s amazing that the Kirtland Temple was even around to be sold to the LDS Church a few weeks ago. In 1838, just a few days after Joseph Smith left Kirtland, Lyman Sherman burned down a print shop that had gone over into Mormon dissenters’ hands and the temple was apparently scorched in the …
Just before Joseph Smith made a brief escape from Nauvoo over the Mississippi River into Iowa, he made a strange request. He asked his followers to take up their glue guns, their knitting needles, and their macrame rings to make a giant craft project—namely a sixteen-foot-long flag. He wanted to carry this “flag for the …
From the September 1982 edition of the Sunstone Review. BYU’s Wilkinson Center bowling alley comes in dead last according to the October Playboy’s ranking of “sex on campus” among 20 American universities. BYU’s sexual temperature was a frigid 4 degrees while the “frontier free-for-all” University of Texas (Austin) boiled at a libidinous 212. In fourteen …
In September 1982, the Sunstone Review published an interview with Mark Hofmann. At the time, Hofmann was known for having found a series of extraordinary historical documents. One was the Anthon transcript, which contained symbols Joseph Smith allegedly copied from the golden plates and sent to New York scholar Charles Anthon. Another contained an alleged …
By M. David Huston M. David Huston lives and works in the Washington, DC metro area. He is a husband and the father of four children. Although it remains outside the LDS Church’s canonized scripture, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” (hereafter, “the Proclamation”) is framed authoritatively. It ascribes “divine design” to the …
Recently I saw Ardis Parshall of Keepapitchinin post the August 1925 cover of The Children’s Friend (the official publication of the LDS Church’s Primary organization). What made the image interesting was the fact that it showed two children sitting with their dog in front of a gigantic mushroom. The mushroom had windows and doors in …
By Amanda Hendrix-Komoto Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. She is the author of “Undressing Mahana: The Development of Mormon Modesty Culture and the Display of Polynesian Bodies,” forthcoming in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism after 1945 from Oxford University Press. When Mormons adopted polygamy in the mid-nineteenth century, …
