of Kurt Manwaring
Spencer Fluhman will never forget the summer of 1999. The 26-year-old college student was a participant in one of the first summer seminars ever conducted by Richard Bushman, the noted Columbia University historian and biographer of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Continue reading “New book out of BYU celebrates legacy of ‘disciple-scholar’ Richard Bushman”
Laurel Thatcher-Ulrich is a noted historian who teaches at Harvard University and has an essay in To Be Learned is Good: Essays on Faith and Scholarship in Honor of Richard Lyman Bushman (Maxwell Institute, 2018).
In January 2018, I had the privilege to interview two historians associated with the Joseph Smith Papers Project: Matthew J. Grow and R. Eric Smith. Both scholars served as editors for the 2017 publication, “The Council of Fifty: What the Records Reveal about Mormon History.”
Continue reading “10 questions with Matthew J. Grow and R. Eric Smith”
The life of Parley P. Pratt is inextricably linked with the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow shed additional light on Pratt’s life and his influence on the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their new biography, “Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism.” The contents of the book, along with a recent lecture by the authors at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City, provide answers to many questions about Pratt, including the following:
Continue reading “Five questions and answers about Parley P. Pratt”
After receiving interview responses from R. Eric Smith and Matthew J. Grow for an upcoming “10 questions,” it occurred to me I may have forgotten an important question.
Experts are often asked the same questions over and over. Yet are there questions they wish someone would ask?
As it relates to the Council of Fifty minutes, I asked R. Eric Smith this very question in an addendum to the “10 questions” interview.
Continue reading “10 questions with R. Eric Smith (addendum)”
“The Council of Fifty: What the Records Reveal About Mormon History,” is a timely book published by BYU’s Religious Studies Center. While the minutes of the council were published in their totality via the Joseph Smith Papers in 2016, they still remain somewhat inaccessible to general readers. “The Council of Fifty” contains 15 essays by leading scholars about relevant topics of interest. Continue reading “Book Review – The Council of Fifty: What the records reveal about Mormon history”