Archiving Heaven and Earth

Name: Archiving Heaven and Earth
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
SKU: 9780252059988
Price: 240.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESSISBN: 9780252059988

The Historian's Office and the Making of Mormonism

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$240.00

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By Robin Scott Jensen
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Release Date: June 14, 2027
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Weight:
Pages: 264

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From the earliest days, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considered the keeping of records both a sacred command and a practical need.

Robin Scott Jensen explores the Church Historians Office against the backdrop of how writing and archiving what was written shaped the growth, faith, and identity of the nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint movement. As Jensen shows, records simultaneously created and preserved history. Journal keeping and letter writing stood alongside official documents as an essential means for Saints to understand their mission and place in American society. Over time, the Church Historians Office evolved into a powerful institution that guided memory and authority by deciding what to collect, copy, or destroy. Jensen tells the stories of the forgotten archivists, many of them women, who built the Church Historians Office, while revealing the choices and conflicts that led to Native and other voices being marginalized or erased.

Detailed and candid, Archiving Heaven and Earth provides a rare look at a foundational organization.

Robin Scott Jensen is a historian and archivist at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History Library.

Introduction

Chapter One: Institutionalizing the Archives: Bureaucratic Direction Through Changing Leadership

Chapter Two: Culling the Archives: Scrapbooking and the Utah War

Chapter Three: Contesting the Archives: Finding Memory at a Time of External Scrutiny

Chapter Four: Observing the Archives: Womens Presence While Creating an Institutional Past

Chapter Five: Constructing the Archives: Andrew Jenson and the Publication of Church Chronology

Chapter Six: Creating the Archives: Gathering and Arranging Native Voices

Conclusion

Bibliography

"In this dynamic and highly readable book, Robin Jensen shows how, between the death of Joseph Smith in 1844 and the dedication of a new church headquarters in Salt Lake City in 1917, a succession of church historians and archivists helped place history at the center of Mormon faith. They created, preserved, and culled manuscripts; cut and pasted ephemera into scrapbooks; fashioned timelines, lineages, and affidavits; and in multiple ways made history matter not just to church leaders but to their fellow saints. Yes, they colonized Native American records and muted the voices of women, but it is worth asking whether history, as they understood it, remains at the center of Latter-day Saint faith today."

--Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of A Midwifes Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

Archiving Heaven and Earth

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