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New 4 volume history "transparent, honest, faithful"


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35 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

There have been a couple threads here that I've commented on in the past, I found this one, but I recall another thread when the Ensign published the sample chapters, yet I couldn't find that one in my search.  

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/69088-new-four-volume-comprehensive-history-of-the-church-to-emerge-next-year/

"New four-volume comprehensive history of the Church to emerge next year" -- another prophecy fulfilled!

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7 minutes ago, rongo said:

Are DHC (the official church history edited by Roberts) and CHC (Roberts's history up to 1933) even available in the Gospel Library? I would guess that they aren't (I don't have a smart phone). While people can buy DHC at Deseret Book, nobody does anymore. CHC is a rare item that you'd have to buy as you find it (I have my great-grandmother's set, myself). 

I would prefer that the Church promote and reprint and emphasize those. There would need to be new things printed on important new developments and post-1933 history, but it would do people and the Church a lot of good if they simply were encouraged to read the Church histories that already exist. 

I just checked my Deseret Book "Bookshelf" app and found that both  Comprehensive History of the Church and History of the Church are accessible for purchase and download.

And I understand that History of the Church will be republished as part of the Joseph Smith Papers. (My recollection is a bit cloudy on this, so don't hold me to it.)

 

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3 minutes ago, CV75 said:

"New four-volume comprehensive history of the Church to emerge next year" -- another prophecy fulfilled!

Wasn't much of a prophecy. Just me reporting on a talk I heard Elder Snow give last year in St. Louis at the Mormon History Association Conference.

 

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1 hour ago, rongo said:

Are DHC (the official church history edited by Roberts) and CHC (Roberts's history up to 1933) even available in the Gospel Library? ..................

Scholars prefer to cite Roberts, ed., History of the Church as HC, not "DHC."  Both HC and CHC should be in every Mormon's personal library, and referred to often.  All the idiotic complaints about members not being told about this or that aspect of Mormon history could thus be avoided.  Roberts let it all hang out.

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5 hours ago, rongo said:

There are things he didn't know or didn't have access to, for sure. But even accounting for that, he compares very favorably with the best of modern Mormon historians.

I respect your opinion, but I highly doubt this and I haven’t heard any professional historians involved in Mormon Studies make this kind of a claim about Robert’s work.  

5 hours ago, rongo said:

It is really staggering what some people (Thomas Jefferson, B. H. Roberts, etc.) did (amount of self-motivated learning, writing production, knowledge, etc.) with what they had, compared to what any one of us has nominal access to. Or the George Reynolds Concordance of the Book of Mormon, written while in prison for polygamy under the Edwards Act. 

I agree and I’m not disparaging Roberts or others who did so much with so little.  Really amazing stories and he was very influential on Mormonism, there is no doubt about all of that.  

6 hours ago, rongo said:

Do you think that the new narrative history will contain a detailed description of the evolution of the anti-polygamy legislation?

It would be nice to see, but I highly doubt it.  The gospel topics essays on polygamy don’t even cover it sufficiently and they are written in a more sophisticated way than the narrative history is.  

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6 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

I guess I'm not seeing what, if anything, precludes teachers and speakers in the Church today from drawing upon the new history or the Gospel Topics essays or the Joseph Smith Papers project or the older works by B. H. Roberts or any other authoritative and properly vetted source for inclusion in their lessons and sermons

What’s precluding it?  Not updating the hard copies of the manuals, keeping the new material as merely supplemental.  On a personal note I met with local Ward and Stake leaders in Sunday Schools last year during the D&C studies year to teach them about the online resources and to have them encourage their use.  I also met with my Bishop and Stake President on this same topic.  I followed up a few times as well giving examples where lessons taught in class were missing valuable information and recycling old stereotypes and myths that scholarship sanctioned and produced by the church was being contradicted.  Yet I didn’t see any substantial movement in my ward and Stake and after a while I felt like they were more focused on other matters.  Which was probably true.  

So until the leaders (big 15) start sharing the new more complicated narrative and leading the way, I just don’t see significant progress happening.  

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On a personal note I met with local Ward and Stake leaders in Sunday Schools last year during the D&C studies year to teach them about the online resources and to have them encourage their use.  I also met with my Bishop and Stake President on this same topic.  

Was this on your own initiative or were you following instructions?  Think it was great if first, but understandable if nothing happened.

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3 minutes ago, Calm said:

Was this on your own initiative or were you following instructions?  Think it was great if first, but understandable if nothing happened.

It was me being proactive and trying to find something positive to contribute.  I ended up helping some individual members through my efforts, but no major changes in the Sunday School content unfortunately, we had all three of our teachers teaching out of the hard copy manuals and while one of them occasionally used a few online resources it was never from the JSP or revelations in context or the topics essays.  It was an opportunity squandered, but I tried.  

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2 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

I respect your opinion, but I highly doubt this and I haven’t heard any professional historians involved in Mormon Studies make this kind of a claim about Robert’s work.  ..........................................................................

Then it is time you read the praise of the best professional historians on B. H. Roberts𐐛

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V03N04_27.pdf .

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Honest, Transparent and Faithful.

2018 is a bit late in the day for the Church to be coming clean about it’s history. Especially as historians have already put the information out there. Is this simply another attempt (after the essays) to try and spin the history in a manner that steadies the ark?

It will be interesting to see whether or not honesty and transparency are the priority.

I’m skeptical.

https://lds.org/languages/eng/content/history/saints-v1/03-plates-of-gold

 

No mention of Joseph’s treasure seeking, simply states that Joseph found a stone and had a divine gift for seeing things not visible to the natural eye.

Edited by Marginal Gains
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38 minutes ago, Marginal Gains said:

https://lds.org/languages/eng/content/history/saints-v1/03-plates-of-gold

No mention of Joseph’s treasure seeking, simply states that Joseph found a stone and had a divine gift for seeing things not visible to the natural eye.

You need to read further into Chapter 4:

Twenty-one-year-old Emma Hale first heard about Joseph Smith when he came to work for Josiah Stowell in the fall of 1825. Josiah had hired the young man and his father to help him find buried treasure on his property.1 Local legends claimed that a band of explorers had mined a silver deposit and hidden the treasure in the area hundreds of years earlier. Knowing Joseph had a gift for using seer stones, Josiah offered him good wages and a share of the findings if he would help in the search.2

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2 hours ago, Okrahomer said:

You need to read further into Chapter 4:

Twenty-one-year-old Emma Hale first heard about Joseph Smith when he came to work for Josiah Stowell in the fall of 1825. Josiah had hired the young man and his father to help him find buried treasure on his property.1 Local legends claimed that a band of explorers had mined a silver deposit and hidden the treasure in the area hundreds of years earlier. Knowing Joseph had a gift for using seer stones, Josiah offered him good wages and a share of the findings if he would help in the search.2

You are quite correct, I should’ve read on.

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7 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

What’s precluding it?  Not updating the hard copies of the manuals, keeping the new material as merely supplemental.  On a personal note I met with local Ward and Stake leaders in Sunday Schools last year during the D&C studies year to teach them about the online resources and to have them encourage their use.  I also met with my Bishop and Stake President on this same topic.  I followed up a few times as well giving examples where lessons taught in class were missing valuable information and recycling old stereotypes and myths that scholarship sanctioned and produced by the church was being contradicted.  Yet I didn’t see any substantial movement in my ward and Stake and after a while I felt like they were more focused on other matters.  Which was probably true.  

So until the leaders (big 15) start sharing the new more complicated narrative and leading the way, I just don’t see significant progress happening.  

It’s an interesting history in that it “focuses on our sacred past.”  It is rare that a narrative can at once be both historical to the highest standard and convey sacred concepts. Since sacred matters are not complicated, the accurate narrative clothing them needn’t be (that said, “Those who want to read the actual records, better understand related topics, and discover even more stories will find links in the back of the books and online...”). In those respects, Saints represents tremendous and unprecedented  progress.

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6 hours ago, Marginal Gains said:

Honest, Transparent and Faithful.

2018 is a bit late in the day for the Church to be coming clean about it’s history. Especially as historians have already put the information out there. Is this simply another attempt (after the essays) to try and spin the history in a manner that steadies the ark?

It will be interesting to see whether or not honesty and transparency are the priority.

I’m skeptical.

https://lds.org/languages/eng/content/history/saints-v1/03-plates-of-gold

Thats my concern as well.  

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5 hours ago, Okrahomer said:

You need to read further into Chapter 4:

Twenty-one-year-old Emma Hale first heard about Joseph Smith when he came to work for Josiah Stowell in the fall of 1825. Josiah had hired the young man and his father to help him find buried treasure on his property.1 Local legends claimed that a band of explorers had mined a silver deposit and hidden the treasure in the area hundreds of years earlier. Knowing Joseph had a gift for using seer stones, Josiah offered him good wages and a share of the findings if he would help in the search.2

Interesting, I didn't know they had posted more chapters, I've only read 1 & 2.  I'll have to check this out, thanks.  

Also, if this is the only reference to Joseph's use of seer stones, its a carefully worded section.  If you think critically, you could word this very differently and present the same information.  

For example, a person could point out that Joseph never found any treasures with his seer stones, yet he profited off the folk lore in the community about his abilities to see things hidden in the earth with scrying stone.  Treasure digging and scrying were folk magic practices that were still being employed by some people in rural communities in the 19th century.  Some discussion about other folk magic practices that were employed by early Mormons could include divining rods, magic talismans and parchments, dates and positions of the stars, animal sacrifices, necromancy, iimbuing objects with powerful properties, etc.  

Its essential to try and understand the entire context and beliefs of Joseph and early Mormons when it comes to these practices.  Just saying that Joseph had a gift for using seer stones isn't enough.  People could read right over that and not catch the implications of that statement.  What did it mean for someone to have a gift using seer stones?  Also, I think the use of the word seer is likely anachronistic for that time period.  Peep stone or scrying stone were likely the words that would have been used.  

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It seems like it be hard to really get detailed about the past when written as they propose "it is a narrative history written in an engaging style that will be accessible to both youth and adults"

I imagine it'll somehow mention something like no record of Joseph's first vision story until 12 years after it is claimed, and that mention actually puts it at a different year than his other accounts.  But it'll be more of a passing comment, not really addressing what one might consider the issues that such facts raise.  

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30 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

Interesting, I didn't know they had posted more chapters, I've only read 1 & 2.  I'll have to check this out, thanks.  

Also, if this is the only reference to Joseph's use of seer stones, its a carefully worded section.

Chapter 3 also deals with the stone.

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10 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

What’s precluding it?  Not updating the hard copies of the manuals, keeping the new material as merely supplemental.  On a personal note I met with local Ward and Stake leaders in Sunday Schools last year during the D&C studies year to teach them about the online resources and to have them encourage their use.  I also met with my Bishop and Stake President on this same topic.  I followed up a few times as well giving examples where lessons taught in class were missing valuable information and recycling old stereotypes and myths that scholarship sanctioned and produced by the church was being contradicted.  Yet I didn’t see any substantial movement in my ward and Stake and after a while I felt like they were more focused on other matters.  Which was probably true.  

So until the leaders (big 15) start sharing the new more complicated narrative and leading the way, I just don’t see significant progress happening.  

So if I'm reading you correctly, you still want the Church to force-feed its active members, but you want the force-fed content to be what you approve of.

 

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7 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Then it is time you read the praise of the best professional historians on B. H. Roberts𐐛

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V03N04_27.pdf .

Thanks for the essay Robert.  I'll quote a couple sections from Davis Bitton:  

Quote

The tone is rhapsodic, the form that of testimony rather than history. In such passages, and less blatantly in his comments, explanations, and even narrative passages, Roberts produced a Mormon theology of history, nearly Augustinian in its vision of two cities locked in mortal combat. As subtitle for the CHC he might well have borrowed the title of another of his books — A
Defense of the Faith and the Saints
.

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Mormons need not be ashamed of Roberts as an historian. He is still worth reading. To the extent that young Mormons read about the history of their religion he can serve a real purpose. Nor should the professional historian or the interested non-Mormon neglect his work. Refusing to treat the early Mormon leaders as figures of fun, he conveys to modern readers a sense of the issues as they must have appeared to Mormons of past generations. But Roberts was not, in fact, the personification of History the Judge. One can
appreciate him as an historian while recognizing certain limitations. Among the most basic of these, in addition to those already considered, are the following.

1. Roberts lacked advanced historical training. Since the professionalization of history — through the introduction of German seminar methods and the establishment of Ph.D programs — was still in its early stages at the end of the past century, he was really of an earlier generation. This is not to say, of course, that graduate training inevitably produces historians of quality, or that amateurs or literary men were incapable of producing sound historical scholarship. Roberts had gifts which assured that his work must still be taken
into account, and many a graduate student today, however long he perseveres, will never write a word of history worth reading. The point is simply that Roberts might well have benefited from the rigorous criticism of the seminar. At the very least such training would have helped him to avoid the editorial sins of the DHC.

2. His work was produced before the great quantitative increase in historical scholarship of the past generation. In a way this was fortunate. He did not have to plow through the mountains of secondary monographs which now exist. On the other hand, the fact is that recent scholarship has left many of Roberts' chapters obsolete. If the CHC still has its value as a point of departure, as an interpretation, no one can now afford to stop with its account of the Missouri persecutions, the Nauvoo period, the colonizing of the Great Basin, the economic programs of the Church, the political conceptions of the Kingdom of God, the Mountain Meadows massacre, the Utah War, the antipolygamy crusade, the transition to statehood in Utah, or many other topics of comparable importance. Not only have primary sources relevant to many of these problems been made available, but monographic studies by the score have added facts, interpretations, and insights which were unavailable to Roberts.

3. Although he did utilize primary sources extensively, as I have pointed out, Roberts did not exhibit much interpretive sophistication. Obviously it is unfair to compare him to Marc Bloch or even to a nineteenth-century scholar such as Fustel de Coulanges. But it is important to recognize that exploitation of sources does not consist merely in reading through them and transcribing passages into footnotes. A quality of use is also involved. And when we ask to what extent Roberts subjected his sources to careful and analytical explication, the answer is disappointing but not unexpected.

4. Roberts' conception of history was that of the past century. I have already discussed his notion that history should function as a moral judge. It will not do to say that all nineteenth-century historians subscribed to this view, but many did. In general, Roberts was close to the leading historians of the Romantic period. Such Romantic historians as Prescott, Motley, and Parkman "concentrated on responding emotionally" to the past. They tried to keep in view "the most important, stirring affecting incidents." They often "dealt with character types." They compared history to drama and sought to present it dramatically. They considered it the duty of the historian to be "not only an artist but a judge." They saw history as "the unfolding of a vast Providential plan." They believed that "the historian had a didactic as well as
artistic duty to arrange apparently disconnected events in their proper order." These and other assumptions of Romantic historiography are well exemplified in the work of Roberts.

Quote

Mormon historians of the present generation have already surpassed B. H. Roberts in command of the sources, technical competence, and methodological sophistication.

Thanks for the essay, it was really interesting and I learned some new things.  This essay also clearly supports my earlier challenge to Rongo, when he said that Roberts "compares very favorably with the best of modern Mormon historians."  This is clearly not true and the last quote from Bitton in the essay says as much.  Roberts is an amazing figure with a large influence on Mormonism.  But his writing of history DOES NOT compare favorably with present generation historians, it has been surpassed and Bitton's essay is already a generation removed from contemporary historians who are continuing to build on the past and improve their craft.  

 

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4 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

So if I'm reading you correctly, you still want the Church to force-feed its active members, but you want the force-fed content to be what you approve of.

 

No, I'm not saying that at all.   The new manuals should refer people to the scholarship in the JSP and other reputable scholarly sources, I would even include Dialogue, MHA and other external sources.  They should encourage reading from the best books.  Unfortunately there is explicit instructions and culture that have developed over time to keep people tied to what is in the manual only and nothing else.  It will take time to change that culture. 

I also want the leaders to lead the way on this matter.  They need to be bringing these topics up in conference, and engaging with the scholarship themselves.  The failures to lead out are negatively impacting the members.  

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33 minutes ago, Okrahomer said:

Chapter 3 also deals with the stone.

Just reading chapter 3 now, what do you think of this quote: 

Quote

Joseph and his friends were young and lighthearted. Sometimes they made foolish mistakes, and Joseph found that being forgiven once did not mean he would never need to repent again. Nor did his glorious vision answer every question or forever end his confusion.1 So he tried to stay close to God. He read his Bible, trusted in Jesus Christ’s power to save him, and obeyed the Lord’s command not to join any church.

This is a good example of a problematic statement that is made.  There is quite a bit of evidence that Joseph may have joined another church during this time period, other family members as well.  So making a statement like the one I bolded, is problematic if you're claiming transparency and honest history.  

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36 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

Thanks for the essay Robert.  I'll quote a couple sections from Davis Bitton:  

Thanks for the essay, it was really interesting and I learned some new things.  This essay also clearly supports my earlier challenge to Rongo, when he said that Roberts "compares very favorably with the best of modern Mormon historians."  This is clearly not true and the last quote from Bitton in the essay says as much.  Roberts is an amazing figure with a large influence on Mormonism.  But his writing of history DOES NOT compare favorably with present generation historians, it has been surpassed and Bitton's essay is already a generation removed from contemporary historians who are continuing to build on the past and improve their craft.  

All fair comments, and Bitton was a historian's historian.  However, I was responding to a comment you made which was unfair in light of the page 1 comment by Bitton:

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In 1930, when B. H. Roberts published his six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned journals were silent. But he himself, with pardonable pride, had described his work as "monumental." One Mormon, answering Bernard De Voto's contemptuous description of Utah as an intellectual desert, hailed Roberts as "another Gibbon." Although hyperbolic, the favorable judgment was in general well deserved. Not only was the Comprehensive History of the Church (hereafter referred to as the CHC) far superior to any history of Mormonism which had yet appeared; even today it is a work which no serious student of the subject can afford to ignore.

Your perspective on Robert's was simply too harsh by any measure.

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