User talk:Hydrangeans/Joseph Smith comments

Pertaining to the Joseph Smith page.

Had some free time today, and I hope some nonexhaustive thoughts are helpful, coming as it is from one who's been active on Latter Day Saint movement articles even if not this specific one.


 * Very impressive lede. Smith's is a hard life to summarize, and the lede manages to do it.

Early years
 * Does the end of the first paragraph need a reference note? ("...taking out a mortgage on a 100-acre (40 ha) farm in the townships of Palmyra and Manchester.")
 * Is the Burned-over District being a "hotbed of religious enthusiasm" really controversial enough to require five reference notes?
 * Is a shortened note necessary for Allen 1966 when it is only used once on the page? ("largely unknown to most Mormons,")
 * Just a suggestion, but the sentence about the outcome of the 1826 trial being unclear might benefit from also referencing this essay from The Joseph Smith Papers which concludes that while the lack of evidence that Smith has held in the bridewell "strongly suggests that Neely did not convict JS, the lack of verifiable contemporary records renders tentative any conclusion about the case’s outcome."
 * I would either trim, rephrase, or remove the sentence about Hale saying Smith was "saucy and insolent to his father". Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 18, state this about Hales's statement: "Hales's testimony, however, was undoubtedly influenced by the treatment he felt he himself had received from his son-in-law. The evidence, in any event, indicates that although Smith's family believed in his pophetic gifts, he deferred to his father in matters of family discipline until the latter's death in 1840" (source). It's accurate to say that Hale thought little of Smith, but it doesn't seem that Hales's claim about Smith's relationship with Smith Sr. is historical consensus. At the very least, solomonspalding.com does not seem like the most stable source for this quote.

Founding a church
 * Perhaps ancillary, but I wonder if paragraph 3 is entirely fair to Lucy Harris. While she became skeptical of the project eventually, at first she was with her husband one of the firmest supporters. (See Amy Easton-Flake and Rachel Cope, "Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon", in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, ed. Michael Hubbard Mackay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020], 105–134.)
 * Does the sentence "According to Smith, the angel Moroni took back the plates once Smith finished using them" need a reference note (since it's at the end of the paragraph)? I think Remini, 68 provides the necessary information.

Life in Missouri
 * The sentence "instituting a settlement in Adam-ondi-Ahman, in Daviess County" is at the end of a paragraph; does that need a reference note?

Life in Nauvoo
 * I think there's sufficient disagreement about the photograph in the historical community to make it prudent to note that disagreement. See Peggy Fletcher Stack, " ' The whole affect feels off to me ' — Why Some Historians Doubt That's a Photo of Joseph Smith, Salt Lake Tribune, July 29, 2022 and Ardis E. Parshall, "Is It Joseph Smith? The Scotch Verdict", Keepapitchinin, July 27, 2022. (Parshall's blog is reliable as an example of "well-known professional researchers writing within their field"; for further corroboration of the legitimacy of Parshall's questions, see "Occasionally, legitimate questions are raised about the evidence for authenticity, like this excellent post at Ardis Parshall’s Keepapitchinin blog, urging caution about hasty conclusions" in Jana Riess, "A Real Joseph Smith Photo—or Not? Why do Mormons Care so Much?", Religion News, July 28, 2022.

Legacy
 * "In it, two conflicting characterizations of Smith have emerged...": This phrasing uses the present tense which suggests the bifurcated historiography persists. Is that still the case, though? Shipps wrote her landmark essay in 1974; has the historiography not changed since then?
 * Does the paragraph about "Memorials to Smith include..." need a reference note?
 * "...Smith's brother Samuel, who died mysteriously..."; but the referenced note (Bushman, RSR, 555) just says Samuel died of billious fever; is that so mysterious?
 * "Membership in Young's denomination surpassed 16 million members in 2018." Two thoughts: first, one could appropriately give the name of the denomination, i.e. "Young's denomination became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)"; second, it seems worthwhile to rephrase that to "members of record" since active membership varies from recorded membership, i.e. sometimes people are recorded as members by baptism or birth but are not always un-recorded if they stop practicing and participating. See David G. Stewart and Matthew Martinich, Reaching the Nations: International Church Growth Almanac, 2014 Edition (Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation, 2013); for a more accessible corroboration of this, see Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, introduction to roundtable review of Reaching the Nations in Mormon Studies Review 3 (2016): 148: "If the R[eaching ]T[he ]N[ations] estimate of 30 percent total activity for the entire church is correct—and the authors’ success in estimating activity on a country-by-country basis suggests that it is—then of the 15 million LDS members worldwide, 4.5 million are considered active." I don't know if it's necessary to get into all of that on the Joseph Smith page, so a change to "members of record" could be sufficient to maintain accuracy.
 * "Many members of these smaller groups..." This sentence ends a paragraph; does it need a reference note?

Family and descendants
 * The second reference note in the first paragraph (appended to the sentence ending "...and David Hyrum Smith") is to an archived website just called "josephsmith.net" that appears to have formerly been run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I realize it's relatively uncontroversial material (just counting who among the Smiths' children survived adulthood), but I can't help but wonder if there are better sources to reference.
 * "...there is unconfirmed evidence..."; that phrasing is somehow strange. If it's unconfirmed, is it evidence? Should this be "contested evidence" instead?
 * The sentence that ends "...special religious marriages that would not take effect until after death" includes a reference to Hales's "Joseph Smith's Sexual Polyandry" hosted on the FAIR website. I think the same information could be referenced at a more stable and reliable source in one of the books Hales has written on the subject in the Joseph Smith's Polygamy series (Greg Kofford Books, 2013–2015). The same note references D. Michael Quinn's "Evidence for the Sexual Side"; I will go to bat for just about anything Quinn writes, but strictly speaking it is a self-published source. The most accessible version is distributed with Quinn's permission on the website Joseph Smith's Polygamy, run by Laura Harris Hales and Brian Hales. The paper was not published with an official editor or peer review.
 * The paragraph about Emma Smith denying Joseph Smith's participation in polygamy seems to mostly be original research; every reference note except for the last one are to primary sources like interviews and newspaper articles. There almost certainly are secondary references that could warrant every sentence in the body text of the paragraph; it's just a matter of adding them.
 * Related to the above bullet point, the quotation in the last reference note is inappropriately sensationalist and sexist for an encyclopedia article: "Brodie speculates that this denial was ' her revenge and solace for all her heartache and humiliation. ... This was her slap at all the sly young girls in the Mansion House who had looked first so worshipfully and then so knowingly at Joseph. ' " This is excessively gossipy in tone and reduces the women involved to sexist stereotypes, both Emma Smith (reduced to a vengeful woman scorned rather than any number of other possibilities, whether grieving widow, mother trying to rebuild her dead husband's and son's legacy, etc., a nineteenth-century woman worried about the potential personal and family blowback of corroborating any of the plural marriages, etc.) and the women who married Joseph Smith plurally (reduced to "sly young girls" rather than thinking, feeling humans who had been asked by a leader they respected to do something extremely unorthodox for their context). Even supposing the retention of other citations of No Man Knows (a subject which remains under discussion; scroll down to comments exchanged between BoyNamedTzu and Awilley), I strongly urge at a minimum removing that particular quotation from the reference note and moreover removing that paginated reference to No Man Knows. Couching something as an author's speculation may theoretically make quotation acceptable, but I do not think that is justification enough for including what can read as little else than a swipe at these women. Overall, the line unnecessarily introduces the tone and mindset of a tabloid into what should be an encyclopedic article. why quote it or direct readers to it?
 * For examples of other interpretations:
 * Emma Smith decided not to talk about polygamy in the hopes of "removing problems from [her children's] lives": "When Emma decided not to tell her children about plural marriage, it was an attempt to remove problems from their lives." In Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 292.
 * Emma Smith's silence on polygamy was couched in the carefully phrased, coded language of Nauvoo polygamy and related to her covenants to keep secret the forms of the Latter Day Saint practices of endowment and celestial marriage: "When she received her endowments she had taken upon herself covenants and promises that she swore never to reveal. She may have chosen to keep not only the forms and procedures of celestial marriage secret, but its very existence as well. She understood the code words the church leaders had used in Nauvoo to protect themselves and continued to use them throughout the remainder of her life. Her denials do not refute 'the true order of marriage,' the 'new and everlasting covenant,' 'celestial marriage,' or any of the other recognized terminology." In Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, 292.
 * On the same wavelength, "She fended off Joseph III's increasingly urgent questions about plural marriage, leaving the impression that her husband had never supported the principle but keeping the door open for the revelation she knew he had received." In Richard Lyman Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 555.
 * Emma Smith had opposed polygamy for most of the time Joseph Smith practiced it, and she believed polygamy was the cause of her husband's death. "Emma Smith opposed polygamy during most of the time her husband practiced it and regarded it as the cause of his death. She did not teach her children the doctrines and practices of her late husband." In D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 237.

Revelations
 * "Modern historian Fawn Brodie..." As opposed to Dan Vogel and Richard Bushman, who by this phrasing are implicitly not modern historians? But what else would they be?
 * "Although the Book of Mormon drew many converts to the church, Fawn Brodie argued that the ' book lives today because of the prophet, not he because of the book. ' "; Interpreting the the Book of Mormon as being ancillary to Smith's influence was more common in twentieth-century scholarship, but more recent work attests to the book's own influence on the Latter Day Saint movement. See for example Janiece Johnson, "Becoming a People of the Books: Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 1–43; and Richard Lyman Bushman, "The Book of Mormon in Early Mormon History", Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 65–78.
 * "The LDS Church has proposed..."; I wonder if the discourse about what degree to which Smith was inspired by the papyri could be shunted into a note instead of the body text? It seems odd to have what is essentially a theological debate in the text, with the Gospel Topics Essay on the one hand and Robert K. Ritner on the other. I say "a theological debate" because Ritner at the end of the essay makes very direct suggestions about the appropriate religious use of the Book of Abraham document. It's not a debate that Smith copied characters (see for instance "Introduction to Egyptian Alphabet Documents, circa Early July–circa November 1835", in The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, vol. 4, Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts (Church Historian's Press, 2018), 53–54); but how one interprets Smith's behavior within the context of producing a religious view of the text he dictated seems to on some level be a matter of religion and theology rather than history and archaeology.
 * ..."prominent Egyptologists note..."; I don't mean to say that other prominent Egyptologists wouldn't agree with Ritner's identification of Smith copying hieroglyphs (they would, as in the JSP reference above, a volume co-edited by Egyptologist Brian Hauglid), but I'm not sure if Ritner's self-posted essay provides verification that multiple, plural Egyptologists have made that identification. It seems to me more likely that most prominent Egyptologists probably aren't interested in Joseph Smith and the Book of Abraham.
 * "According to Parley P. Pratt, Smith dictated revelations orally..."; this reads oddly. Does oral dictation need to be attributed? How else would one dictate? Maybe revise to "Smith dictated revelations orally. According to Parley P. Pratt, they were recorded by a scribe without revisions or corrections."
 * The reference note at the end of the first paragraph under "Other revelations" includes the following: "(Smith "began to efface the communistic rubric of his young theology")." I'm not sure what that's supposed to be saying. There's nothing in the body text of that paragraph about economic implications of Smith's teachings.

Views and teachings
 * For the first reference note of the second paragraph under "Cosmology and theology", should the titles of book chapters be rendered in quotation marks rather than italicized? Otherwise they give the impression of being books rather than chapters.
 * I wonder if there is a better source for the paragraph beginning "Smith favored a strong central bank and..." than B. H. Roberts's History of the Church. Are those political views found nowhere else? A potential alternative source could be Spencer W. McBride, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2021).

References These next are made with less urgency than all foregoing (not to imply that the foregoing are urgent, except perhaps for those which in context are discernibly so), but they could contribute to elevating the page.
 * Richard Abanes, One Nation Under Gods is referenced only once, and redundantly (three other references make largely the same point), and I would encourage removing it. The book received a rather negative review from the Journal of American History: "During the first hundred years after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) was founded in 1830, almost all histories of it were sharply negative or positive. Then a few balanced, scholarly studies appeared, a trend flowering in the late 1960s and after. The journalist Richard Abanes's One Nation under Gods reverts to the negative type".
 * Reid Neilson and Terryl Givens, ed. Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2008) is also never cited, but this seems like a very strange omission given the reliability of the press and the topics involved (chapters like "Joseph Smith vs. John C. Calhoun: The States’ Rights Dilemma and Early Mormon History" by James B. Allen, on Smith's political views and political context; "The Metaphysical Joseph Smith" by Catherine L. Albanese, on Smith's legacy in American metaphysics; and others).
 * I'm surprised to realize that Ann Taves is never cited in this article. Her work has probably some of the most robust naturalistic interpretations of Smith's revelatory experiences, such as in "History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates", Numen: International Review of for the History of Religions 61, no. 2/3 (2014): 182–207 (which includes an interesting criticism of the "pious fraud" model) and Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton University Press, 2017). My sense isn't that her arguments are consensus—they are probably too new, and when it comes to Smith there will probably never be full agreement on the full interpretation—but hers is one more history to draw on for details, and her interpretation seems like it'd fit in the "Impact and assessment" subsection.
 * I'm among those who think Rough Stone Rolling is the best single-volume biography of Smith, but even so this page is very reliant on the book. A control-F for "Bushman (2005" yields 198 hits on a page with 311 notes. Perhaps that's just the way of things when there are relatively few single-volume biographies of Smith's whole life, but I wonder at the absence of other historical monographs, journal articles, and book chapters that intersect with Smith's life. To give only a few examples:
 * Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2011)
 * Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020)
 * Partick Q. Mason, "God and the People: Theodemocracy in Nineteenth-century Mormonism", Journal of Church and State 53, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 349–375
 * Philip L. Barlow, "To Mend a Fractured Reality: Joseph Smith's Project", Journal of Mormon History 38, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 28–50, etc.