Item Detail
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33421
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1
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25
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English
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How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism
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Religion and American Culture
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Summer 2021
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31
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2
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137-192
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"Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plates could have been either stereotype plates or copper plates, both commonly used for industrial printing in the nineteenth-century United States. This article also takes the empirical investigation into what Smith may have encountered as an occasion to reflect, methodologically and theoretically, on the role of ordinary material objects in processes of religious and historical change." [Abstract from article]
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Circulating Specters: Mormon Reading Networks, Vision, and Optical Media
Early Mormon Documents : Volume I
Early Mormon Documents : Volume II
Early Mormon Documents : Volume III
Early Mormon Documents : Volume IV
Early Mormon Documents : Volume V
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View
History and the Claims of Revelation : Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates
Joseph Smith Jr. : Reappraisals After Two Centuries
Joseph Smith Papers : Histories, 1832-1844, Vol. 1
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Joseph Smith : The Making of a Prophet
Kirtland Temple : The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space
Make Yourselves Gods : Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
Mormons and the Bible : The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion
People of Paradox : A History of Mormon Culture
Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity
Railroading Religion : Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West
Small Means, Great Things
Studies of the Book of Mormon
The Joseph Smith Papers : Documents, Volume 1: July 1828-June 1831
The Refiner's Fire : The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844
The Riches of Mormon Materialism : Parley P. Pratt's "Materiality" and Early Mormon Theology