Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books

[alter idem]

On 4/29/2020 at 7:24 PM, JamesBYoung said:

Rick has been saying that for years, and all interested in the history of MMM will hope it will come to pass sooner than later.

Barbara Jones Brown, the Executive Director of MHA, is the lead voice in the project.  Best fortune to here and the early publication of the work.

Seems like it's been like 15 years! But I'm glad the project hasn't been scrapped, as I'd feared. I wish the church would make the records available to other writers and researchers so we could get more to read on this subject. I'm a true crime buff, and this is one that still holds secrets that need to be revealed. 

[JamesBYoung]

All of the millions expended by church research really does not add much to the story lines developed by Brooks and Bagley.

I am hoping Brown et al will not only look on from the September 12th but also re-evaluate the weeks leading up to the horror.

[alter idem]

On 4/29/2020 at 11:51 PM, Valentinus said:

True. However, people who still read the awful "The Work and the Glory" series make teaching church history difficult for many of my S&I friends. There should be a huge disclaimer at the beginning of books like those to the effect that they should only be seen as historical fiction with very few literal historical elements.

They may not be great literature, but I think I have to credit the Work and the Glory series with launching me to my passion for reading church history. When I was a teen I read a few, but came to realize I didn't want to read the made up story parts,  I wanted to know just the facts, the events that really happened.  That desire prompted me to read nonfiction church history books,  which is why I think they have a value. Some won't read or enjoy the books I read, but they can learn some things they wouldn't have known.  I just read The giant Joshua a little while ago and was surprised to find I enjoyed a novel that also taught me a lot about the settliing of St George and pioneer living. Historical novels do have value,  imo.

[alter idem]

20 minutes ago, JamesBYoung said:

All of the millions expended by church research really does not add much to the story lines developed by Brooks and Bagley.

I am hoping Brown et al will not only look on from the September 12th but also re-evaluate the weeks leading up to the horror.

I believe the MMM books are best read and evaluated for facts and truth all together. Bagley's book was great for the amount of content and detail, but his personal bias still came out at times, Brooks is excellent,  but she didn't have access to the Jensen files that Turley had, and imo, that information really does fill in a lot that helps flesh out the event.  That's why I hope the second volume gets written.  I agree, I think that more could be written on the weeks leading up to the massacre, also more information on the settlements involved, and their inhabitants to get more understanding on how this came to happen.

[Damien the Leper]

On 5/1/2020 at 8:21 AM, alter idem said:

They may not be great literature, but I think I have to credit the Work and the Glory series with launching me to my passion for reading church history. When I was a teen I read a few, but came to realize I didn't want to read the made up story parts,  I wanted to know just the facts, the events that really happened.  That desire prompted me to read nonfiction church history books,  which is why I think they have a value. Some won't read or enjoy the books I read, but they can learn some things they wouldn't have known.  I just read The giant Joshua a little while ago and was surprised to find I enjoyed a novel that also taught me a lot about the settliing of St George and pioneer living. Historical novels do have value,  imo.

What got me into church history was Lies My Teacher Told Me by Dr. James W. Loewen. 

[Maureen]

On 5/1/2020 at 9:55 AM, alter idem said:

I believe the MMM books are best read and evaluated for facts and truth all together. Bagley's book was great for the amount of content and detail, but his personal bias still came out at times, Brooks is excellent,  but she didn't have access to the Jensen files that Turley had, and imo, that information really does fill in a lot that helps flesh out the event.  That's why I hope the second volume gets written.  I agree, I think that more could be written on the weeks leading up to the massacre, also more information on the settlements involved, and their inhabitants to get more understanding on how this came to happen.

In the Mormon Land podcast, Turley said that the sequel is written but is "too long for our contract word count" so he and his co-author will be "whittling it down...and then submitting it."

M.

Edited May 7, 2020 by Maureen

[Bob Crockett]

Interestingly, Brooks, Bagley and Turley are not trained historians.  I know they've all won awards, but the giving of awards for history is a rather foolish effort.

 

Brooks was a yellow-dog newspaper reporter.  Bagley was an elementary school teacher.  Turley was a tax lawyer.  

 

[alter idem]

11 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

Interestingly, Brooks, Bagley and Turley are not trained historians.  I know they've all won awards, but the giving of awards for history is a rather foolish effort.

 

Brooks was a yellow-dog newspaper reporter.  Bagley was an elementary school teacher.  Turley was a tax lawyer.  

 

Interesting.  That reminds me of Blake Ostler, who is an attorney, but is also a great theologian and philosopher, imo. I enjoy listening to his podcasts. 

[Nevo]

7 hours ago, Bob Crockett said:

Interestingly, Brooks, Bagley and Turley are not trained historians.

Leonard Arrington wasn't a trained historian either. Some of the best Mormon historians of the past 50 years haven't had history degrees.

[Tacenda]

13 minutes ago, Nevo said:

Leonard Arrington wasn't a trained historian either. Some of the best Mormon historians of the past 50 years haven't had history degrees.

Grant Palmer was! He got a MA in history at BYU, lol! But he was disfellowshipped.  

Edited May 8, 2020 by Tacenda

[Bob Crockett]

9 hours ago, Nevo said:

Leonard Arrington wasn't a trained historian either. Some of the best Mormon historians of the past 50 years haven't had history degrees.

Yes he was.  Although his degree was in economics, his focus was in economic history and his dissertation was in economic history.  His dissertation, Great Basin Kingdom, was widely read.  He held a doctorate and held chairs at two different universities in the area of history.  He was more of a historian than almost all history professors at any University in Utah.

A true historian, University of California's H.H. Bancroft, wrote a history of Utah which included an account of the MMM and he concluded that there was no connivance of the Church in the MMM.  He is truly a historian. 

Bagley and Brooks did not have advanced degrees.  They don't understand academics and research, although I may be overstating it for Brooks.  For example, both Brooks and Bagley had no clue that there were files in the National Archives that could bear on the MMM.  They didn't investigate there, they didn't access the files there.  Those files showed that there were ten years of DoJ investigation of Brigham Young for possible prosecution of the MMM.  There were investigators hired.  There were witnesses located.  In the end, they didn't find anything.  After ten years.  Indeed, the federal prosecutor shortly after John D Lee's conviction informed his supervisors in Washington that he didn't have anything on Brigham Young.  None of that was mentioned by either Brooks or Bagley.  Had they traveled to Washington to look in the National Archives they would have found this material.  

Whereas I don't let Brigham Young off the hook for his less than enthusiastic support for investigation (actually, he produced the Territorial Marshal to effectuate arrests, the DoJ refused the help), there was no "scapegoating" or agreement to thwart justice as both Brooks and Bagley claim.

I also point out something else about Brooks.  She is lauded by many local writers as a premier scholar of southern Utah history.  She wasn't.  She wrote and published a biography of Dudley Leavitt, one of her ancestors and an on-the-ground participant and leader in the massacre.  When her work got to the subject of the massacre, she acknowledged the massacre but said she chose not to mention it further.  I characterize her as a vanity historian, not a true historian

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Bob Crockett]

16 hours ago, alter idem said:

Interesting.  That reminds me of Blake Ostler, who is an attorney, but is also a great theologian and philosopher, imo. I enjoy listening to his podcasts. 

It is my opinion only, but I find Bro. Ostler's writing and reasoning to be tedious.   But I acknowledge it is a matter of choice.  I'm sure he'd find my writings to be simplistic.  

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Bob Crockett]

9 hours ago, Tacenda said:

Grant Palmer was! He got a MA in history at BYU, lol! But he was disfellowshipped.  

I don't consider that as adequate qualification as a historian.  He never had to defend a dissertation.  He never taught courses in secular history as a full professor.  

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Tacenda]

3 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

I don't consider that as adequate qualification as a historian.  He never had to defend a dissertation.  He never taught courses in secular history as a full professor.  

I disagree, he never had the opportunity, IMO, to defend his book, "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins".  

Edited May 8, 2020 by Tacenda

[Tacenda]

45 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

I don't consider that as adequate qualification as a historian.  He never had to defend a dissertation.  He never taught courses in secular history as a full professor.  

The church called him to teach secular history in New Zealand.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_College_of_New_Zealand

[Bob Crockett]

1 hour ago, Tacenda said:

I disagree, he never had the opportunity, IMO, to defend his book, "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins".  

Why would he ever defend the work or have the opportunity to defend?  

"Defending a dissertation" means spending years drafting it, having it go through years of edits, and then standing up to criticism and discussing it for hours with peers.  That is the essence of a doctorate, where skills are honed and interactions with peers are learned.  

I don't consider a teacher of secular history at a secondary school in New Zealand remotely qualified to be a historian.  Sniff.

Mormon history is inherently incestuous.  They give each other all sorts of a awards.  For being boors.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Nevo]

1 hour ago, Bob Crockett said:

I don't consider that as adequate qualification as a historian.  He never had to defend a dissertation.  He never taught courses in secular history as a full professor.  

This is such an asinine discussion. Leonard Arrington studied economics in graduate school with a focus on agricultural economics, but he's a "trained historian" because he wrote a dissertation in economic history. Grant Palmer earned a graduate degree in history but wasn't a "trained historian" because he didn't defend a dissertation. 

One of the most eminent historians in the world, Peter Brown, didn't defend a dissertation (he has only a BA in history). By your standard, he isn't a "trained historian." But Thomas Piketty is.

You then suggest that defending a dissertation and teaching courses in secular history as a full professor (LOL) are required to qualify as a historian. So what do you do with Fawn Brodie? She didn't defend a dissertation (like Juanita Brooks she had an MA in English) but she was a full professor of history at UCLA.

The bottom line is that people who study and write history are historians. There are professional historians and amateur historians, trained historians and self-taught historians. All are capable of producing good and bad work.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Nevo

[Bob Crockett]

30 minutes ago, Nevo said:

This is such an asinine discussion. Leonard Arrington studied economics in graduate school with a focus on agricultural economics, but he's a "trained historian" because he wrote a dissertation in economic history. Grant Palmer earned a graduate degree in history but wasn't a "trained historian" because he didn't defend a dissertation. 

One of the most eminent historians in the world, Peter Brown, didn't defend a dissertation (he has only a BA in history). By your standard, he isn't a "trained historian." But Thomas Piketty is.

You then suggest that defending a dissertation and teaching courses in secular history as a full professor (LOL) are required to qualify as a historian. So what do you do with Fawn Brodie? She didn't defend a dissertation (like Juanita Brooks she had an MA in English) but she was a full professor of history at UCLA.

The bottom line is that people who study and write history are historians. There are professional historians and amateur historians, trained historians and self-taught historians. All are capable of producing good and bad work.

You are suffering the fallacy of arguing that the exception is the rule, a common fallacy made here on this board.  "I know lots of people who didn't go to college and they are successes."   I don't know anything about Peter Brown and Tnomas Picketty, but I've studied the lives and publications of Bagley, Brooks.  They made lots of internal errors.  Unguided and undisciplined.  

For instance, in extended dialogue I had with Bagley, I asked him if his book was peer reviewed and edited by the University of Oklahoma, as I identified several false cites; cites that didn't exist or were miscited.  He said that the University of Oklahoma trusted him to check his own cites.  Sorry, that isn't professionalism.   Bagley and Arrington are not on the same planet.  One studied economic history and defended a dissertation about economic history, and the other was paid to produce a vanity piece.  

Rick Turley isn't a trained historian, but I know his first MMM work published at Oxford went through years of review.  He had to trim his piece by a significant measure to remove surplusage.   He's going through that now with his second volume.

"All are capable of producing good and bad work."     Sure, but what meaning does such a statement have?  No meaning at all.

And for Tacenda to say that Grant Palmer, who taught at a high school, is qualified -- oops, not.

This location contains some of my criticisms of Bagley's procedure.  https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol15/iss2/12/   I left out a lot of tedious criticism of his many footnotes.  Many were completely off.  But substantively they were wrong or bad for other reasons.  For example, Bagley relies repeatedly on anonymous sources. 

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Nevo]

37 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

"Defending a dissertation" means spending years drafting it, having it go through years of edits, and then standing up to criticism and discussing it for hours with peers.  That is the essence of a doctorate, where skills are honed and interactions with peers are learned.  

Actually, my understanding is that Grant Palmer did spend years drafting An Insider's View and that it went through years of edits. And former Signature Books marketing director Tom Kimball stated in a Reddit AMA last year that "all of his chapters were vetted by well know Mormon scholars and historians years before they were ever submitted as a whole to Signature."

Now, I don't like the book and am no fan of Palmer but just saying.

[Tacenda]

18 minutes ago, Nevo said:

Actually, my understanding is that Grant Palmer did spend years drafting An Insider's View and that it went through years of edits. And former Signature Books marketing director Tom Kimball stated in a Reddit AMA last year that "all of his chapters were vetted by well know Mormon scholars and historians years before they were ever submitted as a whole to Signature."

Now, I don't like the book and am no fan of Palmer but just saying.

Thanks Nevo, I didn't read the whole book, just skimmed through. I appreciate the insight on what the book went through, even though you're not a fan of him, you still like facts vs. fiction.

[Nevo]

52 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

For instance, in extended dialogue I had with Bagley, I asked him if his book was peer reviewed and edited by the University of Oklahoma, as I identified several false cites; cites that didn't exist or were miscited.  He said that the University of Oklahoma trusted him to check his own cites.  Sorry, that isn't professionalism.   Bagley and Arrington are not on the same planet.  One studied economic history and defended a dissertation about economic history, and the other was paid to produce a vanity piece.  

It's my understanding that a lot of publishers these days don't employ fact checkers (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books-errors.html), so I'm not surprised that the University of Oklahoma press didn't. You said you found "several" erroneous source citations in Blood of the Prophets. Have you ever looked at the errata for the JSP volumes? That's pretty normal. As for commissioned work, I guess you haven't studied Arrington's list of publications. He wrote (or had assistants write) a lot of commissioned histories, or "vanity pieces" as you call them. So I wouldn't say that Bagley and Arrington aren't on the same planet.

[Calm]

4 hours ago, Tacenda said:

I disagree, he never had the opportunity, IMO, to defend his book, "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins".  

If he had been brave enough to publish it when he first wrote it rather than waiting until after he was able to fund his retirement in the Church’s dime no matter what he said about it, he would have had decades. As it was, the book was published in 2002 and he died in 2017 during which time he gave a number of interviews and presentations and wrote another book, so how was he not able to defend his book?

[Bob Crockett]

There is no reasonable thinker in the world who would equate Grant Palmer's experience and book as having obtained a doctorate.  

[Bob Crockett]

3 hours ago, Nevo said:

It's my understanding that a lot of publishers these days don't employ fact checkers (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books-errors.html), so I'm not surprised that the University of Oklahoma press didn't. You said you found "several" erroneous source citations in Blood of the Prophets. Have you ever looked at the errata for the JSP volumes? That's pretty normal. As for commissioned work, I guess you haven't studied Arrington's list of publications. He wrote (or had assistants write) a lot of commissioned histories, or "vanity pieces" as you call them. So I wouldn't say that Bagley and Arrington aren't on the same planet.

Not true as to university publishers checking sources and cites.  Arrington's commissioned histories have nothing to do with Bagley's vanity piece. Errata in the JSP volumes (I don't even know what that means) have nothing to do with Bagley's errors. 

There is no excuse for Bagley's and Brook's errors, by not inquiring of governments files in the National Archives.  None whatsoever.  There were items in the Huntington Library both ignored, like John D Lee's lawyer saying that he added things to the confession.  And Brooks helped organize the collection.  Inexcusable.  Further, it is like Bagley didn't understand the relative strength of evidence.  He'd ignore direct accounts in favor of secondary accounts.  

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Anijen]

On 5/7/2020 at 3:51 PM, Bob Crockett said:

Interestingly, Brooks, Bagley and Turley are not trained historians.  I know they've all won awards, but the giving of awards for history is a rather foolish effort.

 

Brooks was a yellow-dog newspaper reporter.  Bagley was an elementary school teacher.  Turley was a tax lawyer.  

 

I'm a trained historian, but I am in the legal field. IMO people can be experts in certain areas, but do not have to be in that career. Having said that, I can see your point.