The Geography of Mormon Apocalyptic

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-129
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American West ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter documents how Latter-day Saints in the late 1840s and 1850s deployed the faith’s apocalyptic master narrative to make sense of the lands they colonized in the American West. Drawing on the apocalyptic geography of the Bible, Mormons came to believe they resided in the “wilderness” of the Book of Revelation where they would be protected from persecution. They recognized the region’s peaks as the mountain setting for Isaiah’s prophecies of a last days temple and an ensign to the nations. This chapter also examines how in the late nineteenth century Canada and Mexico would also be incorporated into the era’s apocalyptic geography.

The Bible and Creationism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Trollinger ◽  
William Vance Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
Conservative Protestants ◽  
Over Time

Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square a plain, commonsensical, “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. As this chapter details, over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859), old Earth creationism—which accepted mainstream geology—held sway. But with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood—Noah’s flood explains the geological strata—young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is a geocentric creationism that rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Fawn Chung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
American West ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chinese Labor

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS: THE SLAVERY DEBATES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM IN THE UNITED STATES

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY OSHATZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Slavery Debates

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

scholarly journals Tar & Feathers: Agnotology, Dissent, and Queer Mormon Polygamy

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Nerida Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

In 2014 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) updated their official website to include information about the polygamy/polyandry practiced by Joseph Smith, their founder and prophet, and his many wives. The admission by the LDS Church reconciles the tension between information that had become readily available online since the 1990s and church-sanctioned narratives that obscured Smith’s polygamy while concurrently focusing on the polygyny of Brigham Young, Smith’s successor. This paper entwines queer theory with Robert Proctor’s concept of agnotology—a term used to describe the epistemology of ignorance, to consider dissent from two interrelated perspectives: 1) how dissent from feminists and historians within the LDS Church challenged (mis)constructions of Mormon history, and; 2) how the Mormon practice of polygamy in the late nineteenth century dissented from Western sexual mores that conflated monogamy with Whiteness, democracy and social progression in the newly formed American Republic.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Plural Marriage ◽  
New Religion ◽  
The Church

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Mormon question. In the 1830s, a young American named Joseph Smith founded a new religion that would come to be called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—commonly known as the Mormons. As the Church developed, the practice of plural marriage became central to Mormon theology. Polygamy generated decades of cultural conflict that contemporaries broadly referred to as “the Mormon question.” The conflict was more than a simple condemnation of sexual and marital practices unacceptable to Victorian norms. Rather, it was a contest over the very meaning of Americanness. The Mormon question then generated national discussions about gender, family, and the nature of citizenship that would define the parameters of membership in the late-nineteenth-century American body politic.

Some Scripture Is Inspired by God: Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestants and the Demise of a Common Bible

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-623
Author(s):  
Peter J. Thuesen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago Tribune ◽  
Fourth Estate ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
King James Bible

“A New Testament which Needs neither a Glossary nor a Commentary.” So proclaimed the New York Evening Post on 21 May 1881, in a front-page story announcing the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures. The first major English translation since the King James Bible, the Revised New Testament was billed as the most accurate version ever, and the Post writer did not hesitate to hyperbolize. The printing of the Revision, the reporter declared, would probably “rank among the great events of the nineteenth century.” Meanwhile, as buyers snatched up the first Testaments in New York, a bigger sensation was building in Chicago. Dubbing the new translation nothing other than “the Bible as it is,” the Chicago Tribune printedthe entire Revised New Testament—from Matthew to Revelation—in its regular Sunday edition. Although the Tribune pilfered its scriptural text from the Bible's authorized publishers, the paper lambasted the rival Chicago Times (“the fraudulent newspaper concern on Wells Street”) for printing a “forged” Testament of its own. The unsavory competition in Chicago's fourth estate did not deter an eager public, who bought 107,000 copies of theTribune'sTestament alone. Demand for bound editions of the updated Bible was no less intense, with nationwide sales figures quickly surpassing one million.

Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW MORSE BOOKER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
American West ◽  
San Francisco Bay ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Privately Owned

In the late nineteenth century San Francisco Bay hosted one of the American West's most valuable fisheries: Not the bay's native oysters, but Atlantic oysters, shipped across the country by rail and seeded on privately owned tidelands, created private profits and sparked public resistance. Both oyster growers and oyster pirates depended upon a rapidly changing bay ecosystem. Their struggle to possess the bay's productivity revealed the inqualities of ownership in the American West. An unstable nature and shifting perceptions of San Francisco Bay combined to remake the bay into a place to dump waste rather than to find food. Both growers and pirates disappeared following the collapse of the oyster fishery in the early twentieth century.

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