Item Detail
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21925
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5
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0
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English
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Mormons Study "Abroad" : Latter-day Saints in American Higher Education, 1870-1940
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Charlottesville, VA
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University of Virginia
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Ph.D. diss.
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"In the 1870s American Mormons began to invade American universities. By 1940 hundreds of Mormons had left Utah and Idaho to enroll at Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Church leaders initially sent the students as missionaries, but not to proselytize. Rather, they tapped these women and men for specialized training in professions ranging from law, medicine, and engineering to education. Mormons saw education in Gentile universities as a means to realize a corporate hope: a kingdom of God in the Mountain West. The goal was, in the words of Brigham Young, to gather the world's knowledge to Zion, to help build the perfect society in the "latter days" before God's millennial reign. My project examines how Mormon students maintained their identity outside Utah, the commitments and restraints that brought them back, and the fate of Mormon attempts to reconcile faith and reason. A pattern of student migration and return illumines a larger story of Mormon "modernization," "secularization," "accommodation," and "Americanization." Narratives of these complex processes have focused on LDS President Wilford Woodruff's "Manifesto" of 1890, a momentous declaration that Latter-day Saints must cease to contract plural marriages. All the scholarly attention to the 1890s, however, has obscured important continuities between Mormonism before and after the Manifesto. The 1890 Manifesto and Utah's statehood (1896) marked a truce between Mormons and the federal government. In exchange for relief from federal persecution, Mormons gave up polygamy, theocracy, and economic communitarianism. "Zion" became a spiritual kingdom, not a physical one. Higher education "abroad" remained important, however, for the growth of Utah's fledgling universities and for building infrastructures of agriculture, law, medicine, and education. But even in this more relaxed external state of affairs, consensus about intellectual and spiritual matters proved elusive. As long as higher education was "practical" and "faith-promoting," church leaders supported it unequivocally, but maintaining those ideal boundaries proved impossible." [Author's abstract]
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Excavating Early Mormon History : The 1878 History Fact-Finding Mission of Apostles Joseph F. Smith and Orson Pratt
Joseph F. Smith: Reflections on the Man and His Times
Mormon Studies as an Academic Discipline
Shaping BYU : The Presidential Administration and Legacy of Benjamin Cluff Jr.
The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism