| Description |
During the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon or LDS Church) established a Historian's Office. This office, under the direction of multiple church historians and recorders, used historical narrative and archival records to form a collective memory of the Mormon people. This shared memory offered the church flexibility to respond to external and internal forces that challenged the church, its practices, ideology, or continuity. This dissertation takes as case studies five episodes throughout the nineteenth century that illustrate this archival flexibility. Shortly after founder Joseph Smith's death, the Historian's Office played an important role in offering continuity of leadership at a time of important transition. During the 1857 Utah War, the Historian's Office played a vital role in shaping the narrative surrounding this conflict. The Historian's Office offered important defense to the practice of polygamy and shaped the way Mormons remembered and practiced it. As the bureaucracy of the Historian's Office grew, so too did the opportunities for clerks. Women were hired and asked to work for the office, but their experiences offer a cautionary tale for historians trying to better understand the relative silence of those voices in the archive. Finally, as the end of the nineteenth century approached, staff from the Historian's Office found ways to use archival records to not only support their own causes, but to shape a collective memory and a iv connection to the past for Mormons at a time of intense transition. While specific projects changed over time, as did the men who occupied the Historian's Office, the central goals of that office remained relatively fixed. The Historian's Office thus turned the earthly and temporal chores of collecting, preserving, recording, and writing about the past into sacred and even otherworldly tasks. Church historians and clerks thus engaged in the mundane for celestial purposes-a fitting metaphor for the nineteenth century church where digging irrigation ditches was viewed as building Zion. With each ledger it created, each newspaper it clipped, each affidavit it collected, and each history it produced, the Historian's Office believed it was building an earthly kingdom with celestial ties-an archives managed in the earthly world, that would anticipate an even better world. |
