An office memo from Grant Salisbury and Warren K. Leffler, the writer-photographer team for “U.S. News & World Report” that accompanied Secretary of Agriculture Ezra T. Benson to Russia.

The night we left Moscow to fly down to Kiev, Secretary Benson literally took us to church.

Many of the reporters laughed about it on the way, because Mr. Benson, who is a leading Mormon, had arranged for us earlier to attend a service at the Latter-Day Saints Church in West Berlin, but all the newsmen found one excuse or another for not going. In Moscow, we had no choice because the cars picked us up at the hotel and stopped at the church on the way to the airport. It was around 7:30 o’clock on the chilly, rainy evening of October 1.

As the cavalcade of cars arrived at the Central Baptist Church, on a narrow side street not far from Red Square, somebody wisecracked, “Well, boys, you’re going to get to church whether you like it or not.” (more…)

Susan H. Swetnam. “Turning to the Mothers: Mormon Women’s Biographies of Their Female Forebears and the Mormon Church’s Expectations for Women,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10:1 (1988), 1-6.

Susan H. Swetnam is not a Mormon and as a result makes faulty assumptions concerning Mormonism – she assumes, for instance, that Especially for Mormons is a record of Mormon teachings. (You could make a case, I think, that Especially for Mormons represents a certain lowest common denominator form of Mormon folklore, but not that it represents any “LDS prescriptions for women” as Swetnam asserts.) Swetnam responds to “the dissident voices of Mormon women,” predisposing her to expect reflections of “a clearly subservient role,” “serious disorders born of guilt,” and “something odd and subversive” in that most Mormon of literary forms, “the laudatory ancestor biography.”

Unlike too many other writers with a passionate ideological point, however, Swetnam is very free with specific examples, demonstrating that what she claims to find is actually, indisputably there. (more…)

One afternoon I now know to have been September 1, 1967, my mother gave me a loaf of bread she had baked that morning and asked me to take it through the block to the Kangas home. Brother and Sister Kangas might not be there, she said, but I was to wait until they did come home.

She was right; there was no car in the carport and no answer to the doorbell. So I sat on the retaining wall and kicked my heels for a little while, until a car drove in and Brother and Sister Kangas got out. Sister Kangas was carrying a folded flag. I gave her my bread with a message from my mother, and she thanked me, and I skipped on home. (more…)

My district in Grenoble, France held a street meeting. Once. We didn’t know it was illegal, but were kindly informed of that fact by a passing Jehovah’s Witness. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just had an elder stand up on a planter and start preaching, while the rest of us stood around pretending to be interested bystanders. I have a photo of one of our elders sitting in earnest conversation with a newspaper reporter who happened to come along.

Street meetings are mentioned frequently in reports from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I do not know when they went out of style (except for abortive attempts like ours). They were still being conducted after World War II when Joseph Fielding Smith responded to a missionary son’s mention of a Yakima, Washington street meeting in 1947: (more…)

LDS missionaries working on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, found the Tippett family in 1859. It is unclear how many members of the family joined the Church, but 15-year-old Johanna and her mother Mary Ann were among the converted. It was a source of pride to Johanna throughout her long life that she had been one of the first sister missionaries, if only unofficially: Johanna and her mother purchased materials from the missionaries and spent many days walking the roads of their district, preaching the gospel and endeavoring to find neighbors who would read their tracts. (more…)

See here for John M. Bernhisel’s assembly of the original Utah Territorial Library. See the comments here for discussion on our plans for linking the titles in this catalog to their Google Books scans – and see here for one section of the catalog that has been almost entirely linked to images (thanks, Researcher, for your work on that section. Edje has made contributions to other sections – and anyone else who is interested in helping, a lot or just a little, is welcome to join the fun. Contact me at keepapitchinindotAOLdotcom.) As each catalog section is posted, the links in all previous posts will be updated so that you can move freely around the catalog.

Any surprises here? What pops out as being of interest? (more…)

An article in The Children’s Friend of June 1909 may not be the earliest expression of concern for those we now call “less actives,” but it is the earliest I recall seeing. It seems to me very current in its analysis of the reasons for inactivity, while the old-fashioned charm of its wording breaks through the tedium of pulpit lectures we have heard so often that I struggle not to tune them out.

“During the Civil War it was a dreadful thing to have the name of one’s friend appear in the list of the ‘missing’ after the battle. In our spiritual warfare, there is a record of splendid victories; but there is also a list, not often published, but which may be found by reference to the roll of the association, a list of the ‘missing.’ Their names are upon the roll, but their bodies, their minds, their talents — where are they?” (more…)

The Utah War of 1857-1858 was the nation’s most extensive and expensive military involvement during the period between the Mexican and Civil wars, an armed confrontation between the civil-religious leadership of Utah and the Buchanan administration over power and authority in the territory. Ultimately it pitted nearly one-third of the U.S. Army against Utah’s Nauvoo Legion, arguably the country’s largest, most experienced militia. The historiography and folklore of this conflict is loaded with myths and misunderstandings, not the least of them being the notion that the war ended 150 years ago today – on June 26, 1858 – when Brevet Brig. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Utah Expedition marched into and through a Salt Lake City deserted and ready for the torch.

(more…)

My ward has ties to Latter-day Saints in Zimbabwe. They ask for our prayers for their safety during the current election, and also that they will find sufficient food for their families. Please remember them.

A wet spring had filled the reservoir at Hatchtown, Garfield County, Utah, to the top of its spillway: on Monday, May 25, 1914, its earthen dam held back about 14,000 acre feet of Sevier River water. All was well when caretaker A.W. Huntington made his routine morning inspection.

At 2:00 p.m. he discovered a muddy ooze below the dam and summoned help. For hours he sought the source of the leak. The ooze increased to a stream, and the ground above began to cave, first in small slabs, then large, until the dam gave way entirely at 8:00 p.m. Water burst through the five-story-high breach with the pressure of a fire hose, scouring farmland far beyond the river banks as the flood rushed northward. (more…)