The Mormon History Association Conference

Photographs: the spiril atop the Community of Christ Temple, a stained glass window inside (depicting the field already to harvest; not that it contains both wheat and rice, respresenting differing cultures), the spiril from the inside, the organ and stand in the sanctuary.

We were so exhausted by the time we got to Kansas City Thursday afternoon, we decided not to attend the opening session of the conference that evening. With a good night's sleep at the Boswell home, we were ready to go early on Friday morning. We started the conference at 6:30 am with the newcomer's breakfast buffet. There was no program with this breakfast but it was followed by a general session with speaker Laurel Thatcher Ulrich from Harvard University speaking about her current research on "Faith and Family in the Diaries of Wilford Woodruff, 1837-38." She is a fabulous speaker and her topic was of great interest.

Rand and I split up for most of the sessions but met up for lunch and dinner. The lunch speaker on Friday was Becky L. Savage, the first female member of the First Presidency of the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or RLDS). She spoke about her spiritual journey to where she is today. It was VERY interesting. The Friday evening dinner program was the presentation of the annual MHA awards. These awards are given each year for scholarly papers and books. The only book (receiving an award) with which I was familiar was the new compilation of Eliza R. Snow's poetry. I purchased this book a couple of months ago but have not yet had time to take a close look at it.

We started the day off Saturday morning at another 6:30 am breakfast, this one sponsored by the Mormon Women's History Initiative Team. This breakfast included a short program with speakers giving research sources for Mormon women's history, information I will definitely put to good use. An announcement was made of a new series of books to be published of individual Mormon women's history. It was also announced that the Church History Library is in the process of putting many more of its records on the Internet, and the first of these should be available by the end of the year-VERY good news to hear.

This breakfast was followed by a general session with speaker Catherine A. Brekus, Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She spoke on the topic of "Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency." She is a historian of religions and started by talking about the problem of religious women not being taken seriously by history scholars. She then applied this to Mormon women, who are taken even less seriously by scholars. Though not LDS herself, Dr. Brekus had really done her research and had some excellent points to make about writing Mormon women's history. I took lots of notes, which I will study again when I get home.

The Saturday luncheon program was a readers' theater presentation of research on contemporary Mormon women's lives which Claudia L. Bushman has done through Claremont Graduate University. She had four women reading excerpts from the research (done through personal interviews). It was interesting to see the differing viewpoints represented.

An interesting session I attended included a paper on the history of LDS cooking and diet and how it relates to the Word of Wisdom. The speaker is working on a dissertation for her PhD on this topic and uses old cookbooks for her main source of research. I have an old cookbook from my mother that is all marked up. This speaker gave me some ideas of how to interpret and learn from the recipes that Mom used and thus learn more about her. I know it sounds like a strange research topic, but it was really very interesting.

Another interesting session was an open discussion on optional ways of writing Mormon women's history. There were several interesting people in this session, including Richard Bushman (author of Rough Stone Rolling) and I came away from the discussion with some provocative ideas for approaching future writing projects.

Another highlight of the conference was meeting so many interesting people in the sessions, in the hallway and at meals. At one meal I discovered I was sitting right next to Mark Staker, author of the newly published book, Hearken O Ye People, about Kirtland. I was so excited to meet this author. He graciously answered my questions and later signed my copy of the book (which I just happened to have in the trunk of my car). I highly recommend this (very scholarly) book to anyone who wants to learn more detail about the Mormon Kirtland period.

I really can't describe all of the interesting things we heard and experienced at this conference. I'm afraid we're really hooked on Mormon history now (if we weren't already). Next year's conference is in St. George and focuses on the Cotton Mission. How can we miss that one?

The final event for this conference weekend was a devotional held at the Community of Christ Independence Temple on Sunday morning. I attended this alone while Rand went to church meetings with the Boswells. The devotional was entitled, "Songs of the Saints: The First Hymns from Zion's Homeland." It was an hour of singing hymns originally published in "The Morning and Evening Star" (the Mormon newspaper) in the early 1830s, along with commentary about the hymns. It was a fitting ending for this beautiful conference.

The Community of Christ Temple is their headquarters building and contains a beautiful meeting hall that seats 1600 people. They do not have temple ordinances, so it is not a temple in the way that LDS people think of temples, but it is nevertheless a holy place for them. After the devotional I was able to go on a tour of the building and then spend a few minutes in their small museum, where they have a number of interesting items, including the original door to the Liberty jail, the original paintings of Joseph and Emma Smith with which we are all familiar and a number of personal items that belonged to Joseph and Emma (such as Emma's petticoat, rings, and Joseph's walking stick).