Before there was Mark Hofmann, there was “Jim the Penman.”
Jim – or James Townsend Saward – was an English barrister, active in the British law courts in the 1840s and ’50s. This legal gentleman had a profitable sideline as a forger of checks. He was even involved in the gold theft that formed the basis of Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery.
After Saward was convicted and transported to Australia, the nickname was bestowed on Emanuel Ninger, a New York counterfeiter who netted an estimated $50,000 profit in his short 1880s career. Continue reading “Jim the Penman” →
The victorious European and American powers drafted the Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs at the end of World War I. This Treaty also created the League of Nations, a prototype United Nations.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a staunch supporter of the League of Nations; the U.S. Senate, which by constitutional fiat must ratify treaties before they become the law of the land, was not, and ultimately voted against the Treaty. (The United States’ formal acknowledgment of the end of hostilities was the Porter-Knox Resolution, an act of the U.S. Congress passed in 1921 and signed by Warren G. Harding, Wilson’s successor.)
Continue reading Two Presidents Meet, 1919 →
Lottie Owens was born in 1877 in Willard, Box Elder County, Utah. Her mother’s family were early Church members in Nauvoo; her father had emigrated to Utah as a convert from Wales.
Among the Owens family’s closest friends during Lottie’s childhood was another Welshman, Evan Stephens, the gifted teacher and composer who would one day transform the Salt Lake Stake’s choir from a good local chorus into the world-class, award-winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Lottie learned to sing under the guidance of Evan Stephens and absorbed his techniques for teaching ordinary Saints to sing with extraordinary beauty. Continue reading Charlotte Owens Sackett: Teaching the Sisters to Sing →
Mormonism has provoked a great deal of legislation and legal commentary over the years: laws to abolish plural marriage, administrative policies to curtail Mormon immigration, test oaths to eliminate Mormon suffrage. While most of that occurred during the bad old pre-Manifesto days, echoes of those early days forced the courts to consider and accommodate Mormonism for years after those courts had seemingly forced us to adapt to their ways.
Here is one such echo, from 1910: Continue reading Where Is a Mormon’s Abode? →
The Utah Historical Quarterly is a rich source of Mormon history that is less well known to the broader LDS community than the more obviously Mormon-themed periodicals like Dialogue, Journal of Mormon History, and BYU Studies. This review of an article from 1980 illustrates the kind of material that can be found in UHQ’s files. Continue reading From our exchanges: “‘The Goose Hangs High’: Excerpts from the Letters of Martha Hughes Cannon” →
Where our past is never very long ago