Fifteen years ago, David Conley Nelson wrote about LDS Church collaboration in Nazi Germany, winning the Juanita Brooks Award for the best graduate student pape from the Mormon History Association. His research became his doctoral dissertation, and, this year, a monograph published by the University of Oklahoma Press. This panel, including members of the Journal …
Speaker: Will Bagley
CRITICAL VISION: THE RESEARCH AND WRITINGS OF JERALD AND SANDRA TANNER
CRITICAL VISION: THE RESEARCH AND WRITINGS OF JERALD AND SANDRA TANNER Raised LDS, as teenagers and prior to meeting each other, both Jerald and Sandra Tanner began to examine their LDS faith. Soon after they were introduced to each other, they began to research Mormonism in earnest and, in their words, left the LDS church …
TWO ROADS TO THE TRUTH: APPROACHING HISTORY THROUGH RESEARCH AND IMAGINATION
Judith Freeman and Will Bagley have written a prizewinning novel and prize-winning history of the darkest event in Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In Freeman’s Redwater, three wives of John D. Lee describe life on the ragged edge of the Mormon frontier. Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets carries forward Juanita Brooks’s work through its …
A BIOGRAPHER’S BURDEN: DECONSTRUCTING ROBERT REMINI’S JOSEPH SMITH AND WILL BAGLEY’S BRIGHAM YOUNG
Two recent books, Joseph Smith, by Robert V. Remini, and Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Will Bagley, each present fresh, illuminating insights into their subjects. But each work also suffers from significan’t shortcomings that illuminate what I call “the biographer’s burden,” the responsibility to treat personalities, motivations, …
Wrestling with the Devil: New Evidence on the Mountain Meadows Massacre
When I began investigating the murders at Mountain Meadows seven years ago, I knew a wealth of material had surfaced since Juanita Brooks completed her groundbreaking study in 1950. These included the 1857 diary of Brigham Young’s Indian interpreter, Wilford Woodruff’s journal, and the LDS archives items Don Moormon used to write Camp Floyd and …
Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon and he California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856–1857
“Hang ’em up, like pirates!” That conclusion regarding the Mormons, reached by the editor of the Sacramento California American, echoed the sentiments of many California newspapers during the critical years of 1856–1857. Drawing on both pro- and anti-Mormon sources, this presentation will replicate, through dramatic reading and commentary, some of the more inflammatory newspaper wars …
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
At the 2002 Mormon History Association conference, Richard Turley, director of the Church’s Family and Church History division, stunned attendees with the announcement that he and two other Church historians are producing a volume on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Immediately, rumors circulated that the book was a response to several forthcoming publications on the massacre. …
New Light On The Mormons 19th-Century Western Infantry: A Discussion Of Will Bagley’s And David Bigler’s Army Of Israel
New Light On The Mormons 19th-Century Western Infantry: A Discussion Of Will Bagley’s And David Bigler’s Army Of Israel From General Daniel Tyler’s classic account of the 1850s to Norma Ricketts’s scholarly work nearly 150 years later, the Mormon Battalion continues to fascinate historians and history buffs. Recruited in 1846 to aid the United States …
The Women of Mountain Meadows
The Women of Mountain Meadows This paper will look at the most terrible event in Utah history and the women whose lives it touched, including Caroline Knight, Eleanor McLean Pratt, Nancy Huff Cates, Ann Gordge Lee, Sarah Dulap Lynch, and Juanita Brooks. Through their eyes we see how the massacre of 120 innocent men, women, …
Kingdom In The West: An editors’ Roundtable
Kingdom In The West: An editors’ Roundtable Lyndia Carter, Will Bagley, Michael Homer, Violet Kimball, William MacKinnon, B. Carmon Hardy, Melvin C. Johnson