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The spiritual text that forms the basis of Mormonism?in the last
edition edited by its founder, Joseph Smith, Jr.
"THE BOOK OF MORMON" is one of the most influential? as well as
controversial?religious documents in American history, and is
regarded as sacred scripture by followers around the world,
including members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, the fourth-largest religious body in the United States.
According to Mormon belief, "The Book of Mormon" was inscribed on
golden plates by ancient prophets. I t contains stories of ancient
peoples migrating from the Near East to the Americas, and also
explains that Jesus Christ appeared to the New World after his
resurrection. The golden plates were discovered in upstate New York
and translated by Joseph Smith, Jr., under the guidance of an
angel, Moroni. From this divine revelation, Smith founded the
Mormon sect, which is now comprised of more than 12.5 million
members worldwide.
As early as the 1780s, African Americans told stories that
enabled them to survive and even thrive in the midst of unspeakable
assault. Tracing previously unexplored narratives from the late
eighteenth century to the 1920s, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brings to light
an extraordinary trove of sweeping race histories that African
Americans wove together out of racial and religious concerns.
Asserting a role in God's plan, black Protestants sought to root
their people in both sacred and secular time. A remarkable array of
chroniclers men and women, clergy, journalists, shoemakers,
teachers, southerners and northerners shared a belief that
narrating a usable past offered hope, pride, and the promise of a
better future. Combining Christian faith, American patriotism, and
racial lineage to create a coherent sense of community, they linked
past to present, Africa to America, and the Bible to classical
literature. From collected shards of memory and emerging
intellectual tools, African Americans fashioned stories that helped
to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of
relentless oppression.
In a pioneering work of research and discovery, Maffly-Kipp
shows how blacks overcame the accusation that they had no history
worth remembering. African American communal histories imagined a
rich collective past in order to establish the claim to a rightful
and respected place in the American present. Through the
transformative power of storytelling, these men and women led their
people and indeed, all Americans into a more profound understanding
of their interconnectedness and their prospects for a common
future.
The chaotic and reputedly immoral society of the California mining
frontier during the gold rush period greatly worried Protestant
evangelicals from the Northeast, and they soon sent missionaries
westward to transplant their religious institutions, beliefs, and
practices in the area. This book tells the story of that
enterprise, showing how it developed, why it failed, and what
patterns of religious adherence evolved in the West in place of
evangelical Protestantism. Laurie Maffly-Kipp begins by analyzing
the eastern-based religious ideology that underlay the movement
westward and by investigating the motives behind the founding of
home mission boards dedicated to the spread of Christianity and
civility among new settlers. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and
journals of hundreds of California "argonauts," Maffly-Kipp
describes those missionaries and their wives sent to California
after 1848 and the virtually all-male mining society that resisted
the missionaries' notions of moral order and in turn created new
religious beliefs and practices. Maffly-Kipp argues that despite
its alleged immorality, the California gold rush was actually one
of the most morally significant events of the nineteenth century,
for it challenged and brought into conflict the cherished values of
antebellum American culture: a commitment to spiritual and social
progress; a concern with self-discipline, moral character, and
proper gender roles; and a thirst for wealth fostered by the spirit
of free enterprise.
Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits,
women have always been historians. Although few participated in the
academic study of history until the mid-twentieth century, women
functioned as primary translators and teachers, offering
explanations, allegories, and scholastic narrations of the past.
Though often lesser known that white women in the historical
literature, black women wrote textbooks, pedagogical polemics,
popular poems, and sermons assessing ancient Ethiopia, contemporary
Liberia, the role of the female historian, and the future of the
black race.
This anthology aims to bring together approximately sixteen
writings by African-American women between 1832 and 1920, the
period when they began to write for American audiences and to use
history to comment on political and social issues of the day. The
pieces are by more familiar nineteenth-century writers in black
America--like Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Alice
Dunbar-Nelson--as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers whose
participation in their local educational systems thrust them into
national intellectual conversations. Each piece will have a
headnote providing biographical information about its author as
well as contextual information about its publication and the topic
being discussed. The volume will contain a substantial introduction
to the overall enterprise of black women's historical writings.
Because the editors are both trained in American Studies and
religious history, their introduction will particularly highlight
religious themes and venues in which these writings were presented.
This book should appeal to general readers of books like those in
the Schomburg Libraryseries, as well as those who work and teach
American history, African American studies, womens studies,
American literature, and American religious history.
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