This is a great day for women’s sources. We now have access to more and richer sources than ever before. I opened with a review of 19th- and 20th-century writing about women that pointed to several “crossroads” that highlight the need to better understand women’s agency, individuality, and integration into historical writing. In response, I urge a return to the records of, by, and about Mormon women.
In 1950, one historian justified ignoring women by saying, “Although women had reached the threshold of their modern freedom they were still so much the forgotten members of society that little satisfactory direct evidence about them has survived.” In 1977, Davis Bitton reviewed fourteen libraries and archives in Utah and throughout the United States to find nearly 3,000 Mormon diaries and autobiographies, with 489 created by women (17%). Today, in one of those libraries—the Church History Library—there are 9,001 diaries and autobiographies, with 1,596 created by women (18%).
The scope of the work is staggering. In a typical month, the Library processes an average of 500 printed and rare items and 300 archival collections. In 2015, those figures, together with 1,100 collections that were opened to research, mean that more than 10,000 items and collections became available for research in the Library in a single year.
Furthermore, over the past few years millions of pages of historical sources have been digitized and placed online. The Church History Library coordinates with the BYU Library to post thousands of periodicals and other sources on archive.org. We have posted another 6.8 million images in our online catalog. In 2015, 2.7 million images were posted online, a rate of 307 per hour, or in other words, during the time we are together today another woman’s diary will be posted online. As a result, all of the sources in the new volume of Relief Society documents are already in the catalog, as are most of the sources cited in the Gospel Topics Essays about mother in heaven and about priesthood, temple, and women. To assist with future research on Mormon women, we today published a new research guide on “Women in Church History.”
Today more than ever we must pay heed to the warning of Emmeline B. Wells that the “historian of the present age will find it very embarrassing to ignore woman in the records of the nineteenth century.”
The final segment of my talk made these recommendations for historical writing:
I closed with a list of “Don’ts.” The list is obvious, but I offer them here because, well, people still do them. The best histories of the future will place women in context and provide nuanced understanding, but these make for a clear starting point.
Let’s move #LDSwomen’s history beyond biography #CHsymposium pic.twitter.com/BrAhShs1zo
— Keith Erekson (@KeithAErekson) March 3, 2016
[Note: This is a summary of the talk I gave this morning at the Church History Symposium. Future posts will provide additional links, sources, and stories.]
Commentary
A packed house for the first #CHSymposium plenary speaker, @KeithAErekson, on sources in Mormon women’s history. pic.twitter.com/FMpuxcsFuO
— Benjamin Park (@BenjaminEPark) March 3, 2016
.@KeithAErekson: this is impressive. In span of presentation, another women’s diary was digitized. #CHSymposium pic.twitter.com/XOuDEtoChW
— Benjamin Park (@BenjaminEPark) March 3, 2016
@KeithAErekson keeps Tweeting while he’s talking. Can’t believe he’s not juggling, too.
— Spencer Fluhman (@spencerfluhman) March 3, 2016
The hooting and hollering at @KeithAErekson‘s list of Don’ts for historical writers was me. That was me. 🙋🏻 #CHsymposium #LDSwomen
— Eliiiiiiiiizaaa (@EtotheNev) March 3, 2016
.@KeithAErekson pres. on sources & directions in Mormon Women’s History is a must for the field. #CHSymposium pic.twitter.com/LCWcFAQq7W
— Juvenile Instructor (@MormonHistoryJI) March 3, 2016
From the Religious Studies Center blog (March 7, 2016): “Speaking at the BYU Church History Symposium on March 3, 2016, Keith A. Erekson, director of the LDS Church History Library, shared impressive statistics about the library’s digitization of sources, announcing a new research guide on ‘Women in Church History.’ The library houses the largest collection of Mormon women’s history in the world. He urged the sympathetic audience, ‘Don’t omit women, ever,’ eliciting a cheer. He added, ‘Don’t think women’s history is only for women or historians.’”
This essay was published on January 28, 2016, in the Deseret News and the Church News.
The Church History Library has recently placed several new items on display in its “Foundations of Faith” exhibit. An ancient papyrus, a record of the first general conference, and the handmade sketch that accelerated the construction of temples over the past two decades are among the items that make the Church’s organization and growth relevant to visitors today.
The oldest item that has been added to the exhibit is a fragment of papyrus scrolls, which date from the second century B.C. The scrolls were acquired by the Church in 1835 after having been discovered in Egypt.
Shortly thereafter, Joseph Smith began translating the book of Abraham.
The scrolls were sold to multiple parties in 1856 and most may have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Later, 10 fragments were discovered to be held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where Kirtland-era paper was attached to the back side as reinforcement. The fragments were transferred to the Church in 1967.
Visitors can also now see two items from the Church’s first general conference on June 9, 1830. At the meeting, Joseph Smith Sr. was ordained to a ministerial position and the certificate of his ordination was signed by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.
Fifteen years later, Lucy Mack Smith dictated a narrative of her life and family. In her history, on the page open to display, she gives emphasis to the priesthood ordination that is documented by the record created at the time of the event.
The “Call to Save Grain” was written in 1876 by Emmeline B. Wells as an editorial in the Woman’s Exponent, which launched a Relief Society program that influences the Church to this day.
The article inspired women to gather and guard wheat carefully, loan it to the poor, and share it in times of drought. These relief efforts expanded in 1906 when the women sent wheat and other supplies to San Francisco after an earthquake and to China during a famine. In 1978, the Relief Society officially transferred its wheat to the Church’s Welfare Services program. The grain storage initiative thus served as a forerunner to the Church’s welfare, family and humanitarian services programs.
The youngest item in the exhibit is a sketch created by President Gordon B. Hinckley in June 1997. After reflecting on how to help faithful Saints in outlying areas receive the blessings of the temple, he drew a floor plan for a smaller temple with only the essential facilities. He announced the concept at the October 1997 general conference and by August 1998 the first small temple had been completed in Monticello, Utah. Since 1997, more than 50 small temples have been constructed or announced in 19 additional countries and 17 U.S. states where none had been before.
The exhibit’s self-guided tour pamphlet has been revised to answer common questions, to explain how the documents are preserved, and to draw out stories about the experience and impact of women as well as the Church’s worldwide mission and growth.
The “Foundations of Faith” exhibit opened in September 2014, promoted a dramatic increase in visitors to the library, and served as the core of an extremely successful youth conference experience last summer. An online version of the exhibit is available at https://history.lds.org/exhibit/foundations-of-faith.
The Church History Library is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday evening until 9 p.m. and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The library preserves important records so that we may reflect on, write and understand history. Admission to the library and exhibit is free and open to the public.
Several profoundly important questions emerged during the Texas Conference on Introductory History Courses. How important is the introductory survey course? What will its future look like? Do we need to think differently about the survey course? Texas provides an important setting in which to ask these questions for the simple fact that Texas is not like Las Vegas—what happens in Texas will not stay in Texas.
How important is the introductory course in Texas? Texas lies at the center of college history teaching in the United States. During the Cold War, the Texas State Legislature mandated six hours of college-level history for all students, a requirement that continues even as other states have eliminated history requirements or allowed other elective substitutions. This fact, combined with the population size of the Lone Star State, prompted one book publisher to observe that in any given semester there are more students in US history survey courses in the Houston metropolitan area than along the entire eastern seaboard.
Because of the outsized impact of Texas, the future of the introductory survey course in America is tied to the future of college history in Texas. For this reason, it was extremely significant that Texas Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes addressed the gathering and responded to questions (kudos to the conference organizers!). Paredes began with the larger context that concerns parents and policy makers: Texas’s six-year graduation rate for undergraduate programs is 60%, and its three-year completion rate of associate programs is 14%. Those strikingly low numbers, combined with escalating college costs and postgraduation debt, have drawn the attention of lawmakers. Though a proposed bill addressing the introductory history course did not make it through the legislature in 2015, it will likely resurface at the next session in 2017. What are lawmakers concerned about? In Paredes’ words, “the big shortcoming in American public education is the quality of teaching.” How will lawmakers make improvements? “We are going to have to measure learning outcomes,” said Paredes, and “degree plans will have to demonstrate marketability.” The future in Texas looks like a world in which history professors will have to show that their courses do more than train students to answer identification questions and write book reviews.
What does the rapidly changing world of 21st-century higher education mean for the survey course? The old view of the course held that college was different from K–12 learning, that the course was taught by people with different training, that the course was therefore “harder” than a high school course, and that it was the “first” or “gateway” or “introduction” on a pathway to something like a major or a career. But the expansion of the AP program and the development of dual-credit programs mean that policy makers, parents, and students now look at the course very differently. For instance, to save time and money, a high school student could take the course in high school. Alternatively, a college student living in a community with a university and a community college could take the same course at either institution at starkly different costs (and sometimes the courses at both are taught by the same instructor!). Perhaps most significantly, completion of such a course is often seen as the “end” of history study, a requirement to be eliminated quickly before moving on to the courses that “really matter” for one’s future.
The landscape for history teaching in Texas is changing; and with Texas, the nation. If we are to respond to these changes it will require more than personal reflection and consensus building. We’ll need to develop and apply the scholarly literature that has developed over the past three decades on history teaching and learning. Gatherings like this conference in Texas provide the opportunity to do just that.
This post appeared on the American Historical Association’s AHA Today blog on September 29, 2015.
This essay was published on July 23, 2015, in the Deseret News and the Church News. It it reproduced here with links to the sources cited. I am grateful to my colleagues Marie Erickson, Jenny Lund, Emily Utt, Michael Landon, Tyson Thorpe, and Deb Xavier for their leads, advice, and support.
The first Mormon settlers of Salt Lake City came to the area in 1847, and over the next 20 years they were followed by an estimated 70,000 emigrants. Now, nearly two centuries later, a new database provides fresh new insights about these overland pioneers.
The Church History Library’s Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database, online at history.lds.org/overlandtravels, attempts to document every overland pioneer and is the product of more than two decades of work. The database currently lists more than 57,000 individuals with links to thousands of original and authoritative records of pioneer experience. The database can be searched by name or browsed to find stories and photos of the city’s first residents.
Here are five things we learn from this powerful new resource:
1. Most of the pioneers did not die.
Despite the fact that tens of thousands of pioneers survived to settle in the Salt Lake Valley, the idea of pioneer death has been perpetuated in popular culture. But, if a person compares rosters of pioneers who started the journey against later censuses of residents in the city, the result is quite surprising.
Using the database, a team of statisticians and a historian calculated the pioneer mortality rate at 3.4 percent, which was only slightly higher than national averages at the time (between 2.5 and 2.9 percent). Of the 1,900 pioneers who died on the trail or within the calendar year of their arrival, many died from illnesses common to the time, such as cholera or dysentery. The year of travel, month of departure, and mode of travel all influenced the likelihood of death (Source: BYU Studies).
2. Very few pioneers pulled handcarts.
Monuments, murals, movies and music have also enshrined the image of a struggling pioneer family pulling a handcart across the plains. But, scan the list of more than 370 companies in the database and you’ll find only 10 handcart companies. This mode of transportation was used in 1856-57 and 1859-60 by roughly 3,000 of the overland pioneers.
The trip by handcart was, however, quite rough. For eight of the companies, the mortality rate was 4.7 percent. Two of the companies, the ill-fated Willie and Martin companies, left late in the travel season, became trapped in early winter snows, and required the aid of rescue wagons sent from Salt Lake City. These two companies suffered a 16.5 percent mortality rate (Source: BYU Studies).
3. Pioneers actually had fun.
If most of the pioneers weren’t dying or pulling handcarts, what did they actually do? Their diaries, letters and other records show that in addition to completing the tasks and chores of traveling, most of them had fun. They formed friendships, helped one another, sang and danced, hunted game, gathered wild fruit, picked flowers and climbed hills.
“We enjoyed the journey much,” wrote Ellen Hallett to her parents in England in 1862. “When night came we were generally tired,” she added, “but not too much to enjoy the dance and song.” William Fuller wrote to his wife’s parents that she “walked almost the entire way. The truth is, you somehow get the spirit of walking, and the travelling is not half so bad as it is to sit and think of it.”
This year, the Overland Travel website begins a new feature sharing “Humor on the Plains,” such as an embarrassing encounter with a skunk, a squishy discovery of soft buffalo chips, and the hijinks of teenage boys with wagon grease.
4. Many of the pioneers traveled east.
One of the striking features of pioneer diaries and letters is how often they met other pioneers going the opposite direction on the trail. Many who completed the journey returned to the east to lead others along the route. Freighters moved goods back and forth. Mormon missionaries left Salt Lake City and followed the trail to the cities and states of the east. At least three pioneers in the database made the westward trip seven times! In this, even Brigham Young provides an example. After leading the vanguard pioneer company that arrived on July 24, 1847, he returned east to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, by December 1847. He led a second company to Salt Lake the following year.
5. Pioneers were not alone on the trail.
Even as Mormon pioneers traveled both west and east, they were far from the only travelers on a very busy trail. Throughout the nineteenth century, hunters and trappers traversed the trails and rivers. The first portion of the overland trail led to Utah as well as Oregon and Montana. Beginning in 1849 westbound gold seekers used the trail to get to California. Express riders and stage coaches carried mail and passengers back and forth. Historians estimate that more than 500,000 Americans traveled west during the 1840s through 1860s. Salt Lake City’s pioneers formed a unique part of the nation’s wider history.
This year, the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database has been integrated with FamilySearch, linking the trees of FamilySearch users with the pioneers in the database. The database is also featured in FamilySearch’s international “I Am a Pioneer” social media campaign (#IAmAPioneer), which will encourage individuals today to recognize themselves as modern-day pioneers and emphasize the need to record their own stories of triumph for future generations.
[These comments were presented at the Mormon History Association Annual Conference, June 6, 2015, as part of the session “Telling Mormon History.”]
Our very language of English turns out to be quite impoverished for telling of historical things. Let’s begin with the word “history,” used by English speakers to mean past, story, and inquiry.
Sometimes we use this word history to describe the past, a moment or moments in previous times that existed once, but no longer. Novelists and sci-fi writers have dreamed of traveling to this history, while the marketing materials at historic sites and museums often promise that fee-paying visitors can “step back in time” to this kind of history. Such rhetorical deceptions elide the fact that the past is gone and all that remains of it are traces, pieces, records, sources created “way back then” that somehow wind up today in a family or library collection. Sometimes, as Richard Saunders pointed out, people will point to a trace and allege that it was the whole. Even very well trained and intelligent persons can mistake the contents of a letter or journal entry for “the past” and believe that they have discovered history.
Next, we use the very same word history to describe the stories that we tell about the past, as in an academic who wrote a history of the church or, as Richard Jensen illustrated, a clerk who prepared an annual history of the congregation. This kind of history is inseparable from the perspective of the teller, as highlighted by the sponsor of our MHA handbag who reminded us there is his-story, her-story, and my-story (but apparently no our-story). Again there is the temptation to conflate, this time the written “story” with the “past” in rhetoric that grants the teller authority over both past and present. If I can convince you that my telling of history really was the way it was, then I have hidden the loss of the past, I have hidden its fragmentary and politicized records, and I have hidden my own present perspective in a triple sleight of hand that happens far more frequently and with far less fanfare than horse racing’s Triple Crown.
Third, the word history is also used to describe the process of inquiring about the past and the stories told about it. So history is a discipline, a profession, a methodology of academic inquiry and discourse. The traces matter here, as do the perspectivally-based stories, but most importantly, the inquiry finds its home amongst a community of inquirers and participation in the community becomes a way of differentiating the trained inquirers on the inside from those on the outside who just love history (amateurs) or collect its traces as a hobby.
Past, story, inquiry . . . the English word history is used to mean them all. So how do we know which meaning we invoke? Does my Church History Library house the past and its traces, or tell stories, or promote inquiry? Do polemicists battle over the existence of the past and its traces, the validity of its stories, or the sophistication of the inquiry? Has this session brought any of us into communion with the past, into the presence of good stories, or fostered future inquiry?
We don’t really know, or at least we cannot know in English because there is not a word in our Westernized and professionalized lingua franca for the meta- cognitive analysis of what we are actually doing when we say that we are doing history. Richard Saunders had to use what seems like an invented word, “historiology.” The word “historiography” doesn’t cut it either because it, too, is burdened with more usages than a Swiss pocket knife. We need words that will remind us that the debates Saunders traced unfolded within a larger Western and professional context in which historians seeking authority in modern society looked to Ranke and sources in quest for objectivity that was contested from the outset by Progressive historians. We need words that will suggest that the Mormon encounter with historicism and higher criticism should not and cannot not be viewed outside of the context of Protestants and Catholics who likewise wrestled with the same concerns. We need words that will help us unravel the sleights of hand and disentangle the assumptions we bring to the table. We need words that articulate the values and experiences of those who seek the past, listen to its stories, and participate in its inquiries.
If doing history were like painting, then we would need to create a composition containing both the hard lines of realism and unbounded and dazzling light of impressionism. In short, if we are to Tell Mormon History, it will behoove us to talk more about what we are doing.
Mormon History Association Annual Meeting 2015
Provo, Utah, June 6, 2015
Session 4F. “Telling Mormon History”Richard L. Jensen, “A Record-Keeping Culture? The Rise, Fall, and Partial Resuscitation of Local Latter-day Saint Historical Records”
Dr. Richard L. Saunders, “The Contest over Historical Proof in Mormonism in the Generation before MHA: Brodie, Burgess, Morgan, Smith, Smith, Smith, and Others”
Brent Smith, “Taking Mormon History Into All the World”
The word history refers to three different but related things–to the past, to the stories people tell about the past, and to the formal inquiry into the past and its stories.
In my mind, the best evocations of history are sensible–they are:
- clear and rational (they “make sense”),
- wise and practical (“common sense”), and
- perceptible to the senses (sensory and experiential).
Everybody does not share the same past or even appreciate the same stories, but everybody can and must take part in the process of asking—and learning—about history.
History matters today more than ever. It is popular–Americans purchase historical books and movie tickets, visit historic sites and museums, commemorate anniversaries and historic places, save old buildings and family heirlooms, and research genealogy and local history. It is polemical–commemorations prompt both reflection and protests, curriculum debates spur both devotion and death threats, and historically themed amusement parks draw both acclaim and ire.
All history is public history because, beyond filling course requirements, beyond teaching critical thinking, beyond preparing people for civic engagement, history possesses the power to whisper life, feeling, and meaning into the present human experience. Because the past can be everybody’s subject of inquiry, everybody’s history matters.
