A common way for archives like the Church History Library to organize the correspondence of historical figures is to first sort the letters by year written, and then within each year sort the letters alphabetically by the name of correspondent. So, for example, if you wanted to know what Joseph F. Smith was reporting to Brigham Young while JFS was a missionary in England, you’d go to the files for 1874 and 1875, and in each of those files you would skip past all the letters written by people named Abbott and Brown and Cannon and Davis and Edwards and … down to the point where Smith fits alphabetically. Voila.
Earlier this week I was reading through the correspondence of a 20th century Church leader. In the files for 1944, and in the first folder where letters from people whose names began with A and B, I ran across letters written by James Shelby Arrigona, Jeannie Simpson Bleakley, and Carl Clifton Booth, all of whom have figured in Keepa stories. These people were scattered from Texas to Ceylon to Bikini Atoll, but they all were connected through acquaintance with this one man whose papers I was reading. When I found and wrote their stories for Keepa, I had no idea they shared this connection with one man.
That’s the way real life works. You discover that your cousin was a college roommate of your bishop’s brother, or that your sister’s new missionary companion grew up in the town where you lived in sixth grade and knows all your old school teachers and Primary classmates.
That happens in Mormon history, too: the children of those who built the Nauvoo Temple end up serving missions in Australia together; men who knew the apostles as missionaries in Great Britain in the 1840s show up in the lists of men who pulled triggers at Mountain Meadows, or as neighbors whose children help build the Logan Temple.
You can’t predict what connections you’ll find, but they’re there. That’s the interconnectedness of real life, especially in societies as small and tightly involved as Mormonism is and has been.
Recognizing this interconnectedness has become one of the ways I judge whether Mormon history is well written. Are there links between characters in a history beyond the primary connection that is at the center of an argument? Do the events fit into a pattern of other events? If the history is written so that people appear seemingly from nowhere, or the historian presents behavior that is out of character for time or place or Mormon background without explaining why people behaved uncharacteristically in this event, then I’m suspicious. Did the historian do is research thoroughly enough to really know his characters? Has he cherry-picked his data points, connecting dots that support his agenda and ignoring those that do not? Arguments that are too neatly constructed, without the interconnectedness of real life, are not persuasive to me.
That’s one of my idiosyncratic rules for judging well or poorly written history.
I realized this week that I had developed another personal rule, without being fully aware that I was reaching this conclusion. It is this: If a Mormon historian really knows his field, and isn’t straining to present an inclusiveness he does not genuinely feel, the stories of women and ethnic groups and non-U.S. Saints and those with physical or emotional differences and all other varieties of believing Latter-day Saints will naturally appear in the telling of Mormon history. That is, unless you’re tracing a narrow and exclusively male sphere (evolving relationships of apostles within the Quorum of the Twelve, maybe, or Mormon life aboard ships engaged in World War II battles), women and other overlooked persons are undeniably present, making contributions which, if omitted from written history, leave us with an inaccurate, impoverished view of the past.
If a historian has to force the appearance of such people – “I haven’t referred to [a woman/a South-of-the-Border Saint/a man who wasn’t a General Authority] for a while; I guess I’d better paste one in somewhere” – then not only isn’t that historian even trying to present a realistic picture of the past, he really hasn’t been converted to the idea that these people merit inclusion except as a grudging submission to political correctness.
When historians aren’t used to looking for a broader picture than has been traditionally painted, then it might be worthwhile having a formal checklist: Have I considered the Relief Society’s role in this event? Am I trying to tell a Church-wide story using examples that come only from Utah? Does this really illuminate Mormon history, or is it really just an American political story? There’s certainly nothing wrong with asking those questions while you’re trying to train yourself to be more inclusive.
But ultimately, inclusion is reality and should be integral to the story. That is, if someone is writing about 21st century Mormon missionary activity, the contributions of women should be inextricably present, simply because sister missionaries are a reality. But if the writer find himself saying, “I’d better plug in the story of a sister missionary somewhere, or else the ladies will be mad,” then he isn’t really converted to inclusiveness – and it shows in the final draft. If a writer think he’s told the story of the Church and education or health or economics or any other topic, and, as an afterthought, looks for places to drop in a story from Mexico or New Zealand or Sweden, then that’s tokenism – he’s already made his arguments without relying on international variations. Dropping in these examples at the end is only window dressing – they don’t really affect the writer’s reasoning or conclusions. That tokenism shows in the final draft.
Historians, don’t wait until your conclusions are drawn and your work is outlined before you look for ways to sprinkle in teh ladies or teh foreigners. Your intentions may be good, but you know what road is paved with good intentions. That artificial injection is painfully obvious and offputting. Instead, train yourself to look for the Latter-day Saint women, and the Latter-day Saints of Florida and Finland and Fiji, while you’re in the research and initial planning stages. Take their experiences into account when you formulate your thesis and reach your conclusions.
So my second idiosyncratic rule for judging whether history is well or poorly written is to consider how well women and other often overlooked Saints are incorporated into the history. Do their experiences affect the course of the story? Or could those bits be snipped out without forcing a change in the historian’s conclusions or even in the structure of the article?
Interconnectedness is natural; it is a part of well written history.
Inclusion is a necessary part of well written history; it must be natural, and integral.
[Note: This post should not be read as aimed at any particular historian or publication. I read history, I work with people who write history, I read and comment on draft history, people contact me asking for suggestions on women and non-US Saints to work into their written history. This realization has been gradually developing as a result of all those contacts.]
Yep. The hard work (and it is) you’ve put into arriving here is gift to our people. Honestly. I think you are spot on.
Well said. Re-examining my recent work, because I want to get better at this. The inclusiveness is one of the things I have noted about Turner’s Brigham Young biography that I am about a third of the way through. A lot of focus on wives who weren’t always part of the inner circle of BY’s extended family in there.
As Stapley said, paraphrasing, you in particular are really good at this.
In fact, if there was a Keepapitchinin T-Shirt, it would have the Keepa logo on the front, and “Keepa Rules” on the back.
Amen, Ardis.
Good point. I think you really can tell when someone is forcing something for political correct-ness and I hope that historians will legitimately care enough to tell the interconnected parts of history.
Ardis you are amazing. This blog is the best part of my day, thank you.
I want a Keepa T-Shirt kevinf, what a good idea.
It’s also a sign that you are doing quality family history work. A family’s history is more than birth-marriage-death and you see that by learning the history of the place, of the neighbors, and of the “other” relatives. Much more fun and tragic.
Interesting and provocative. Oh, and you win for saying “teh ladies” and “teh foreigners.” Keepapitchinin’s new motto: “Layin’ it down with style.”
So, here’s a question: what sources do you use to uncover women’s or minority history?
What type of sources did Leonard Arrington overlook when he wrote his biography of Brigham Young, which (like most of his work) almost entirely ignores women? (Minorities, too.) And how, as Kevin notes, did Turner find his sources?
(Yes, I could make my own attempt at an answer, but I’d be very interested in what you have to say, Ardis.)
This applies to many fields of research. Thanks for the reminder. And I want a Keepa T-shirt!
I very seldom go hunting specifically for women’s (or other overlooked) history. I’m only interested in learning and telling the history of the Church, so I don’t target any specific type of subject — I want it all.
But perhaps where I differ from some is that I notice the presence of these others. When I pursue a specific person, it’s because I’ve noticed him or her in my broader survey. Then I target research on that person the same way you would for anybody in your family history — I check the same kinds of records, and read materials from the time and place they lived, and look for references to them in the papers of people they knew.
I’d be hard put to write a general women’s history, or a history of the Church in such-and-such a place, because I generally don’t think like that. I work on the big picture, and when something catches my eye, I zero in on the small picture at that point.
But if I can put one together, it would be worth a post suggesting places where I’ve found women.
I think Arrington didn’t so much overlook sources as he ignored entire areas of BY’s life. Arrington was interested in economic history and the development of the West, and he just skipped BY’s interior life, and his spiritual side — or the women around BY — in order to focus on the ideas that interested Arrington.
I’ve been working on my upcoming article about the LDS soldiers in Siberia now for some time, and the biggest frustration I have (apart from the MHA publication schedule) is that everyone kept the soldiers letters home, but no one kept the wives, mothers, and girlfriends letters, leaving a huge part of the story untold. My wife’s mother kept all of her husband’s letters to her from his time in Italy in WWII, but he kept none of her letters, sent from the shipyard where she worked. Both sides of that story would be interesting to tell. I am beginning to think that few men ever think in historical terms, while women often like keepsakes for memory’s sake. I hate to generalize, but I have seen this consistently.
And in the interest of inclusiveness, Ardis, if you can send me a high def copy of the Keepa logo, I will look into what it would take to get some T-Shirts printed up, both women’s and men’s sizes.
On the saving letters issue, I think it’s likely less of a male/female thing than the difference in situations. One party is at home with a stable living arrangement and room to store things, the other is moving frequently, traveling light, and perhaps in situations not particularly favorable for storing fragile items like letters.
(That said, I saved all my families’ letters to me while on a mission; if they saved my letters home, I don’t know what happened to them.)
And I would totally buy a Keepa T-shirt. Or an Ardis Parshall Fan Club shirt.
Wonderfully put. I recently read a biography of Emma Smith that did everything wrong you just listed. I’m not sure how it made stories about Emma seem like token mentions in the bigger history of the church, but it did.
We have all of the letters that my father-in-law received while on his mission, but not the ones he sent home. (We are a generation removed from his parents and I don’t know what they did with those letters.) I was told by someone in the Church History Library that “we would be much more interested in the letters the missionary wrote, than in the ones he received.” Well, there you have it.
As the mood hits him, my husband is scanning all of his father’s papers and making them available to family, so at least scans will be available later, if somebody else does care.
Here’s a wonderful example of that natural “full” history you are talking about.
http://history.lds.org/article/lillian-ashby-india-dharmaraju?lang=eng
Ardis, I trust that good historians intuit the rules you identify even if they may not explicitly acknowledge them. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to share with us some specific examples of articles and books that you think exhibit an awareness of the kind of history you’re advocating.
I’ve asked kevinf, if he’s willing, to look into a t-shirt project. You nutters. 🙂
That’s a nice article Joseph M. What I’m trying to get across,though, is hard to see in a story about an individual woman. The first step, of course, is to notice that a woman played a role in the first place, which the author of this article did so well. The next step is tell a broader story — the complete (whatever that means in a field that is dependent on fragmentary records and memories) history of the Church in India. Women should appear so firmly embedded in that story that the history would fall apart if you deleted the paragraphs telling about women’s contributions. If, on the other hand, you cut out the paragraphs referring to women and the article still made logical sense, then I would suspect that the historian merely inserted a few nods to women for mere political correctness, because the presence of women in the history was superficial, not essential.
Gary, I’ll try to identify some good examples. It’s easier, of course, to think of bad examples, ’cause I’m naturally a fault finder. 🙁
Thanks, all, for your contributions to this discussion. You may be nutters, but that may be why I like you all.
Ardis said:
It would be impolite to request that you identify some of those bad examples, huh?
So, call me impolite!
I’m with kevinf–I wish we had access to those letters sent to servicemen. But I can understand why they didn’t keep them. They would have had to put them all in their foot locker or duffel bag and haul them from Fort Rucker, Alabama, to Camp Shanks, New York, across the North Atlantic to Dorset, thence to Cherbourg and into Brittany, then across France to Koblenz and then to Marseille and Vienna and back to New York and Texas and finally Arizona. Multiply that story a million times, and you start to understand why we don’t have those copies.
My dad did write about the mail he received from home:
*More precisely, microfilmed. Look it up with the help of your friend Google–it’s amazing how much shipping space (which was scarce, and badly needed to transport food and war materiel and soldiers and nurses, etc., etc., to Europe) was saved by this method of sending mail.
But see, that’s exactly the information I want to have… my grandparents were the only non-members (or so you would think) in Snowflake during WWII, where they were fellowshipped nigh unto death. News of the ag teacher coming to dinner, or the non-member sister teaching home-ec to the Beehives, would be like gold to me.
And I want a shirt, too.
I’ve seen a number of V-Mails in files recently. They’re roughly 3×4 inches, printed out on the same paper you’d expect to find used for any other photo. People tried writing so tiny, and it’s amazing how clear and legible they are. (I hadn’t seen any until about two weeks ago, so didn’t really have a grasp of what Mark refers to until recently.)
Coffinberry, if that was the math or chemistry teacher or stake president coming to visit (all the same man–my grandfather) then I’d really like to hear that!
As to the T-shirts, let me do some quick research, and we’ll let Ardis announce it when we know costs, etc. Unfortunately, we won’t have them in time to wear while watching conference this weekend, but maybe we can have a “Wear a Keepa Shirt to Church Day” in the near future.
I volunteer to design them, if you need a designer….
No matter how nice the T-shirts would look on a Sunday at church, the meaning would be lost on most of our brethren and sisters. Better to plan a Keepa day at the next MHA meeting, and have a whole battalion of T-shirt clad ‘ninnies there, ready to take over.
Well this made my day. Wonderfully put, Ardis. Thank you.