Category: Features

Have you ever caught yourself singing all four verses of “Redeemer of Israel” in sacrament meeting, only to realize you spent the entire hymn mentally reviewing your grocery list? When we sing the same pairings of sacred poetry and melody for decades, our brains naturally shift into autopilot. But this static relationship between text and…

Ernest Wilkinson was the president of BYU in the mid-twentieth century and did much to build it into the modern university we know today. In a recent interview on the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Gary Bergera spoke about insights into Wilkinson’s efforts to create an entire network of Church education institutions as…

One of the more controversial aspects of the temple liturgy under Brigham Young was the practice of sealing people to their peers as children, particularly if those peers happened to be high-ranking church leaders. The practice was discontinued by the turn of the twentieth century and is rarely discussed by modern church members today, but…

When we walk the halls of our meetinghouses today, we are greeted by intimate, soft-focus portraits of a smiling Jesus Christ, leading many of us to assume that Latter-day Saints have always embraced such direct depictions of the Savior. However, the visual history of the Church tells a much more complex story, revealing an artistic…

Today, the construction of Latter-day Saint temples is a highly streamlined operation funded by a centralized, global tithing system. But in the 1840s, raising a monumental stone edifice on the edge of the American frontier required an entirely different, grassroots financial engine. A fascinating new interview with Elizabeth Kuehn over at the Latter-day Saint history…

The Deseret Alphabet is often dismissed today as a quirky historical footnote, a strange linguistic experiment championed by Brigham Young that ultimately failed to take root in the Utah desert. However, a closer look at this 19th-century phonetic writing system reveals a complex project driven by practical literacy, social control, and profound spiritual ambition. A…

When examining the tragic estrangement of Emma Smith from the main body of the Latter-day Saints following the martyrdom of her husband, historians and casual readers alike tend to reduce the schism to a dramatic, interpersonal feud with Brigham Young over polygamy and the westward migration. However, the reality of Emma’s post-1844 life was far…

When examining the early settlement of the American West, the history of the Latter-day Saints is often populated with complex figures whose religious zeal blurred the lines between civic duty and frontier vigilantism. Few embody this tension as fully as the Latter-day Saint pioneer John Steele, an Irish-born convert, Mormon Battalion veteran, and pioneer physician…