Myth, Materiality, and Book of Mormon Apologetics

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-288
Author(s):  
Olav Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Near East ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Literal Truth ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Canonical Text

The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830, presents a detailed account of the migration of several groups from the ancient Near East to the Americas, and how these groups became the ancestors of the Native Americans. The description of these migrations fits well with common early nineteenth-century beliefs about the origins of the indigenous populations of America, but contradicts in numerous ways the scientific consensus that emerged roughly a century ago. Key apologists have constructed a range of arguments for the literal truth of the Book of Mormon account. This article examines the structure of a number of common apologetic arguments, and shows how interpretive commentary can project new meanings on a canonical text.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Colonization’s New Epistemology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Archaeology ◽  
Scientific American

This chapter describes the rise of scientific American archaeology in the early nineteenth century and its role in the justification of westward colonization and displacement of Indigenous people. Theorists construct two competing migrations: the transatlantic Gothicist one out of Northern Europe that is colonizing America, and the pre-Contact one of Tartars that arrived in America to displace the superior Mound Builders. American colonization is defended as a just displacing of Native Americans, who had previously displaced the Mound Builders. President Andrew Jackson relies on this scenario in 1830 in arguing for his forced removal policy that will cause the deaths of thousands of Cherokee and other tribes on the Trail of Tears in 1838

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
William L. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
Oral Composition

The introduction situates Joseph Smith's oral composition of the Book of Mormon within the religious and rhetorical culture of early nineteenth-century America. In an extended oral performance, Smith gazed into a seer stone and dictated the Book of Mormon to his scribes. The study focuses on orality, oral performance, and the oral composition techniques that Smith used to dictate the work. The introduction also includes a brief summary of the Book of Mormon narratives, along with a discussion on the academic framework for understanding seer stones in the context of Western esotericism and folk magic.

“Nero, the mustard!”

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Margaret Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Deep Knowledge ◽  
Legal Power ◽  
European Culture ◽  
New Meanings

This chapter considers the renaming of enslaved people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using plantation records and narrative accounts, it focuses on the classical names that made up 10–15% of inventory listings. Those who renamed newly acquired slaves after powerful historical and mythological figures from antiquity added a cruel irony to the physical practices of enslavement. They also laid claim to the cultural capital of high European culture, while mocking those denied access to it. But their claim was bogus, resting on the physical and legal power to enslave rather than on any deep knowledge of antiquity. The claim to civilizational and racial purity that underpinned it was also undercut by new meanings, including the perceptions of the enslaved: deployed in the service of racial purity, Classics became creolized. The implications can be traced in an early-nineteenth-century Johnny Newcome print and in the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt.

Prose Fiction and English Interest in the Near East, 1775–1825

PMLA ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 827-836
Author(s):  
Wallace Cable Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Near East ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
Oriental Tale

One of the most important literary manifestations of that direct interest in the Near East which travellers and travel books created, appears in English prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. The prose fiction thus supplements the Near East poetry of Byron, Moore, Southey, and numerous minor versifiers as well as the travel books themselves, which may be considered a kind of minor literature. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century English readers had shown considerable interest in the Near East, particularly in the oriental tale; yet this interest was almost wholly indirect—the product of French accounts or French translations of the Arabian Nights. It was not until the last quarter of the century that new developments brought “the Orient much nearer to England than ever before … In letters, this modern spirit was first expressed by the increased number of travelers' accounts.”

Early Appalachian Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
William Bartram ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The texts collected here describe late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Appalachia as a geographical and political frontier and include Cherokee narratives, works by pioneers and frontiersmen and Native Americans who assimilated into European culture, revealing how this borderland became a cultural, rhetorical, and mythical frontier. The selections also include Enlightenment, Euro-American views of Appalachia from men such as Thomas Jefferson and William Bartram.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
River Channels ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Starved Rock in Illinois. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. Although the Rock itself was not an occupied Native American site per se, like a semi-permanent village, it was a place where, for millennia, Native Americans camped, sojourned, and in a few instances had their earthly remains interred. West and north of Starved Rock, along the ancient river channels that once crisscrossed the Illinois Valley, aboriginal people hunted, fished, and farmed. Oblivious to the movement of Europeans from the Old World to the New, the Indians in the Starved Rock area established a village named Kaskaskia. European trade goods that made the chores of killing, cleaning, and cooking easier reached the Kaskaskia a decade or so before French missionaries and traders made their debut at Starved Rock. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. Their attitudes concerning the use of lands and waterways, and their exploitation of natural resources, embodied values that would have seemed utterly foreign to the Indians who proceeded them.

The History of Starved Rock

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This book provides an overview of the famous site in Utica, Illinois, from when European explorers first viewed the bluff in 1673 through to 1911, when Starved Rock became the centerpiece of Illinois' second state park. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. The book pulls together stories and insights from the language, geology, geography, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and agriculture of the park to provide readers with an understanding of both the human and natural history of Starved Rock, and to put it into context with the larger history of the American Midwest.

Britain, the International Spectrum, and the Eastern Question, 1827-1841

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderic H. Davison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Near East ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Foreign Policy ◽  
British Policy ◽  
Eastern Question

We commemorated in 1988 the sesquicentennial of the Convention of Balta Limani, the ground-breaking Ottoman-British commercial agreement that set a pattern for Ottoman agreements with other powers in the years immediately following. The Convention sprang from British interests and from Ottoman needs during the 1830s in the Near East. My function is to sketch the general international background for the Convention, to look at the situation of the Ottoman Empire, at British foreign policy in the early nineteenth century, and in particular at the development of British policy in the Near East in the years from 1827 to 1841. A subtitle indicating the desirable breadth of view might read “From Navarino (1827) to Nezib (1839), and from Hercules’ Pillars to Hormuz and Herat.”

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