Treasure-seeking Then and Now

Last August I attended the BYU conference on the Mark Hofmann documents where I had an opportunity to reflect on what the documents meant to me. After searching my thoughts and testing my feelings, I came to the conclusion that they meant very little. They did not mean much when they first came out, and their fall from historical authenticity had little effect on me later. That may sound like a strange confession from one who was writing on the early life of Joseph Smith at the very moment the Salamander and 1825 Joseph Smith letters came to light, with their presumably earthshaking revelations about Joseph Smith’s money-digging. Yet it is true

The Character of Joseph Smith

The title of this essay, The Character of Joseph Smith, may promise more than can ever be fulfilled. Joseph warned the Saints of the difficulty in trying to understand him. In the King Follett discourse given two months before his death, he told them, You don\u27t know me--you never will. Another version of the same speech says, You never knew my heart. No man knows my hist[ory]. He seems to say that what we want to know most--his heart and his history--are not to be found out. No matter how much we study him, we must be cautious about believing we have comprehended him. There is too much there, and much of it is far beyond the ordinary. As he continues, I don\u27t blame you for not believing my history had I not expected it [I] could not believe it myself

The Quest for Education

This is a commencement speech Dr. Richard Bushman deliver at Brigham Young University\u27s graduation services, August 15, 1991

The Balancing Act: A Mormon Historian Reflects on His Biography of Joseph Smith

Most reviews of my recent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, mention that I am a practicing Mormon. The Sunday New York Times titled its review, Latter-Day Saint: A practicing Mormon delivers a balanced biography of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. Perhaps a little oversensitive, I wondered why this was news. Was a Mormon telling the story of the church’s founding prophet with a degree of objectivity something like man bites dog? Did the editor mean that a mind capable of embracing Mormonism would surely be incapable of a balanced portrayal? Or that Mormonism evokes loyalties so deep that a dispassionate approach to Joseph Smith would be impossible for a church member? One reviewer spoke of my walking a high wire between the demands of church conformity and the necessary openness of scholarly investigation. Another, surprised by the balance of the book but unwilling to trust me entirely, said it achieved a veneer of credibility

The Archive of Restoration Culture, 1997-2002

When I first began work on Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in 1996, I realized that reconstructing the cultural environment of the Prophet would be one of my largest tasks. I could scarcely conceive how to go about probing the huge quantities of sermons, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, artworks, and private diaries that possibly bore on the restoration of the gospel in the 1820s through the 1840s. Yet the culture of that period bore directly on the success of the young church under Joseph Smith’s leadership. People would never be able to grasp theological ideas that were entirely foreign to them. They would need a basic preparation for the Prophet’s revelations, making the cultural environment crucial to understanding how the Restoration came about. Faced with this apparently insuperable difficulty, it occurred to me that my problem was the problem of every historian interested in early history of the Church. We all need information about the sources as they relate to the distinctive doctrines of the Restoration. I would deal with many of the issues in my biography, but subsequent researchers would think of new questions about Joseph’s times. All of these historians would benefit from a collection of materials from the world in which Joseph Smith flourished. So was born the concept of “The Archive of Restoration Culture,” an assemblage of source materials illuminating contemporaneous thought about the prominent principles of the Restoration. I am pleased now, a decade later, that this massive research database is now available on the BYU Studies website

Joseph Smith’s Many Histories

I wish to explore, in broad general terms, the histories to which historians have attached Joseph Smith. As you can imagine, the context in which he is placed profoundly affects how people see the Prophet, since the history selected for a subject colors everything about it. Is he a money-digger like hundreds of other superstitious Yankees in his day, a religious fanatic like Muhammad was thought to be in Joseph’s time, a prophet like Moses, a religious revolutionary like Jesus? To a large extent, Joseph Smith assumes the character of the history selected for him. The broader the historical context, the greater the appreciation of the man. If Joseph Smith is described as the product of strictly local circumstances—the culture of the Burned-over District, for example—he will be considered a lesser figure than if put in the context of Muhammad or Moses. Historians who have been impressed with Joseph Smith’s potency, whether for good or ill, have located him in a longer, more universal history. Those who see him as merely a colorful character go no farther than his immediate environment for context. No historians eliminate the local from their explanations, but, on the whole, those who value his genius or his influence, whether critics or believers, give him a broader history as well. I want to talk first about the way historians have sought the Prophet’s larger meaning by assigning him a history, and then examine the histories to which Joseph Smith attached himself

The Secret History of Mormonism

This is a book review

Jonathan Edwards and Puritan Consciousness

The writings of Jonathan Edwards contain the most complete description we have of the piety of eighteenth-century American Puritans. Events made Edwards a specialist in Puritan consciousness. As he said, It is a subject on which my mind has been peculiarly intent, ever since I first entered on the study of divinity. Besides inquiring into his own heart, he was chief defender and interpreter of the Great Awakening and closely studied revival conversions to distinguish God\u27s work from mere emotions

The Character of Joseph Smith: Insights from His Holographs

What kind of a man was Joseph Smith? His high calling as a prophet intensifies our curiosity about him as a person, but at the same time obscures him from view. As with so many public figures, the official stands in the way of the personal. We can picture him revealing the Lord\u27s will, preaching to the Saints, and sitting in counsel, but we are also interested in him as a father, a friend, a husband, and a man

Making Space for the Mormons

This work is a lecture that was presented at Utah State University