The Bushman’s have been key instruments in revealing authentic Mormon history, acknowledging current challenges within the church on historic and social issues, and having empathy and appreciation for the doubter. All this while maintaining their faith in, and support of, the institutional church. How have they done this? I see these two not as apologists but activists. We are very fortunate to be able to spend an evening graced by these two Christ-centered intellectuals.

Time: 

Sunday, June 12, 2016, 7:30 pm

Location: 

Home of Elizabeth and Mark England
1194 S. 500 E., SLC, UT

Please come in the back door if you arrive late. 

Details of the discussion:

Claudia will talk about materials concerning Mormons and Salt Lake City that she stumbled across while doing a study of Boston in 1870. She was explicating the diary of an activist named Harriet Hanson Robinson who moved to a Boston suburb and bloomed as “New Woman.” While pouring through the Boston newspapers, Claudia kept coming across long write-ups of people who visited Salt Lake City and came back to tell the tale. The reports offer a new perspective on how Easterners viewed Mormons as the Cullom Bill was under national discussion.

Richard will talk about reconstructing the narrative of early Mormon history in light of the new information that has accumulated over the past fifty years. Most of the discussion will be devoted to questions from the audience about Joseph Smith and early times.

About Claudia and Richard Bushman:

Claudia Bushman, an historian of the United States with degrees from Wellesley College, Brigham Young University, and Boston University, has taught courses on nineteenth century social and cultural history, American literature, American women and Mormonism at several universities, most recently at Columbia University and at Claremont Graduate University.   She has published fifteen books of social and cultural history and is currently exploring the development of the New Woman in America after the Civil War. She and her historian husband Richard Lyman Bushman have collaborated on literary publications as well as producing a family of six children and twenty grandchildren. She was named the New York State “Mother of the Year” in 2002. The Bushmans served as senior scholars in residence at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts for the academic year 2014-2015.

Richard Bushman retired as Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University In 2001, and then came out of retirement in 2008 to accept a position as visiting Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling and is on the National Advisory Board of the Joseph Smith Papers. Among his other books is The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. He is currently completing a book on the American farmer in the eighteenth century. He chairs the Board of Directors of the Mormon Scholars Foundation which fosters the development of young LDS scholars. He has been a bishop, stake president, and patriarch and is currently a sealer in the Manhattan Temple.

Read, listen, watch:

Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean L. Jessee.

Claudia L. Bushman “A Good Poor Man’s Wife:” Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson & Her Family in 19^th-Century New England.