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This is a great day for women’s sources. We now have access to more and richer sources than ever before. I opened with a review of 19th- and 20th-century writing about women that pointed to several “crossroads” that highlight the need to better understand women’s agency, individuality, and integration into historical writing. In response, […]
This essay was published on January 28, 2016, in the Deseret News and the Church News.
The Church History Library has recently placed several new items on display in its “Foundations of Faith” exhibit. An ancient papyrus, a record of the first general conference, and the handmade sketch that accelerated the construction […]
Several profoundly important questions emerged during the Texas Conference on Introductory History Courses. How important is the introductory survey course? What will its future look like? Do we need to think differently about the survey course? Texas provides an important setting in which to ask these questions for the simple fact that Texas […]
This essay was published on July 23, 2015, in the Deseret News and the Church News. It it reproduced here with links to the sources cited. I am grateful to my colleagues Marie Erickson, Jenny Lund, Emily Utt, Michael Landon, Tyson Thorpe, and Deb Xavier for their leads, advice, and support.
The […]
[These comments were presented at the Mormon History Association Annual Conference, June 6, 2015, as part of the session “Telling Mormon History.”]
Our very language of English turns out to be quite impoverished for telling of historical things. Let’s begin with the word “history,” used by English speakers to mean past, story, and inquiry.
Sometimes […]
The word history refers to three different but related things–to the past, to the stories people tell about the past, and to the formal inquiry into the past and its stories.
In my mind, the best evocations of history are sensible–they are:
clear and rational (they “make sense”), wise and practical (“common sense”), and […]
