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Renowned historian Richard Lyman Bushman presents a vibrant history
of the objects that gave birth to a new religion. According to
Joseph Smith, in September of 1823 an angel appeared to him and
directed him to a hill near his home. Buried there Smith found a
box containing a stack of thin metal sheets, gold in color, about
six inches wide, eight inches long, piled six or so inches high,
bound together by large rings, and covered with what appeared to be
ancient engravings. Exactly four years later, the angel allowed
Smith to take the plates and instructed him to translate them into
English. When the text was published, a new religion was born. The
plates have had a long and active life, and the question of their
reality has hovered over them from the beginning. Months before the
Book of Mormon was published, newspapers began reporting on the
discovery of a "Golden Bible." Within a few years over a hundred
articles had appeared. Critics denounced Smith as a charlatan for
claiming to have a wondrous object that he refused to show, while
believers countered by pointing to witnesses who said they saw the
plates. Two hundred years later the mystery of the gold plates
remains. In this book renowned historian of Mormonism Richard Lyman
Bushman offers a cultural history of the gold plates. Bushman
examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and
critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars,
and others—from Smith's first encounter with them to the present.
Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why
do they remain objects of fascination to this day? By examining
these questions, Bushman sheds new light on Mormon history and on
the role of enchantment in the modern world.
The eminent historian Richard Bushman here reflects on his faith
and the history of his religion. By describing his own struggle to
find a basis for belief in a skeptical world, Bushman poses the
question of how scholars are to write about subjects in which they
are personally invested. Does personal commitment make objectivity
impossible? Bushman explicitly, and at points confessionally,
explains his own commitments and then explores Joseph Smith and the
Book of Mormon from the standpoint of belief. Joseph Smith cannot
be dismissed as a colorful fraud, Bushman argues, nor seen only as
a restorer of religious truth. Entangled in nineteenth-century
Yankee culture-including the skeptical Enlightenment-Smith was
nevertheless an original who cut his own path. And while there are
multiple contexts from which to draw an understanding of Joseph
Smith (including magic, seekers, the Second Great Awakening,
communitarianism, restorationism, and more), Bushman suggests that
Smith stood at the cusp of modernity and presented the possibility
of belief in a time of growing skepticism. When examined carefully,
the Book of Mormon is found to have intricate subplots and peculiar
cultural twists. Bushman discusses the book's ambivalence toward
republican government, explores the culture of the Lamanites (the
enemies of the favored people), and traces the book's fascination
with records, translation, and history. Yet Believing History also
sheds light on the meaning of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
today. How do we situate Mormonism in American history? Is
Mormonism relevant in the modern world? Believing History offers
many surprises. Believers will learn that Joseph Smith is more than
an icon, and non-believers will find that Mormonism cannot be
summed up with a simple label. But wherever readers stand on
Bushman's arguments, he provides us with a provocative and open
look at a believing historian studying his own faith.
Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American
history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he
was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities,
and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age
thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a
practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as
a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with
others, and how he received revelations." "
An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, "Joseph
Smith: Rough Stone Rolling" also brilliantly evaluates the
prophet's bold contributions" "to Christian theology and his
cultural place in the modern world.
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for
taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious
pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from
mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and
sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values
originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated
almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the
hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly
nuanced learning, "The Refinement of America" newly illuminates
every facet of both our artifacts and our values.
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Published Revelations (Hardcover)
Joseph Smith; Edited by Dean C. Jesse, Ronald K Esplin, Richard Lyman Bushman, Mark Ashurst McGee, …
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R2,104
Discovery Miles 21 040
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Out of stock
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Revelations and Translations, Volume 2: Published Revelations,
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