Meanwhile, plenty of people in the present can read the Nauvoo minutes and argue that something has been lost that we should work to recover. Figuring out something’s original configuration doesn’t necessarily mean that we in the present should return to that. The book is published by the Church Historian’s Press, an imprint of the Church.Ī big question is present relevance for the text. Like the JSP volumes, this book required a large team of people, besides the primary editors, including researchers both at BYU (Jenny Reeder) and the Church History Department (Randy Dixon, Brian Reeves, Chad Foulger) missionaries who assisted with transcription and biographical research (led by Sister Paddy Spilsbury) editors (led by Eric Smith with lots of help from Janelle Higbee, Jay Parry, and others) and other research assistants, source checkers, etc. At that point, it had been decided to model the book on the Joseph Smith Papers.
After Jill came to the Church History Department in Salt Lake City and Carol retired, Matt Grow and Kate Holbrook became involved in the book, writing introductions and annotations to the documents. Jill and Carol worked on the volume intermittently for many years. Jill and Carol hoped to publish the Nauvoo Relief Society minutes and decided to surround those minutes with documents spanning fifty years of the Relief Society’s history to provide context. The book had its genesis around the year 2000 when Jill Mulvay Derr and Carol Cornwall Madsen were professors at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at BYU. What was the genesis for the volume? Was it a grassroots (or historian-roots) effort, or did the suggestion/direction come from other elements in church leadership? Kate Holbrook (a specialist in women’s history with the Church History Department) and Matt Grow (director of publications for the Church History Department), who each were major editors of the volume, were gracious enough to answer some of our questions. A review will be forthcoming, but to call it a landmark history underplays the importance of the text. Excerpts of key documents are found online as well at the Church Historian’s Press.
You may have heard about the new history by the Church Historian’s Press of the first 50 years of the Relief Society.
0 kommentar(er)
