[Cross-posted from the Mormon Wasp] In my recent journeys around the web I’ve come across bits and pieces of information about some interesting forthcoming books in Mormon studies.

Utah State University Press has these three books forthcoming:

First, Edward Leo Lyman, Susan Payne Ward, and S. George Ellsworth, editors, No Place to Call Home: The 1807-1857 Life Writings of Caroline Barnes Crosby, Chronicler of Outlying Mormon Communities. The book description states:

Caroline Crosby’s life took a wandering course between her 1834 marriage to Jonathan Crosby and conversion to the infant Mormon Church and her departure for her final home, Utah, on New Year’s Day, 1858. In the intervening years, she lived in many places but never long enough to set firm roots. Her adherence to a frontier religion on the move kept her moving, even after the church began to settle down in Utah. Despite the impermanence of her situation, perhaps even because of it, Caroline Crosby left a remarkably rich record of her life and travels, thereby telling us not only much about herself and her family but also about times and places of which her documentary record provides a virtually unparalleled view.

The book is volume seven in the series “Life Writings of Frontier Women.”

The second volume is The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record by Ronald Barney. The book description states:

The 1847 [vanguard] company had a military-like organization, which is captured by Ronald Barney’s term brigade in the title. Norton Jacob was such a man of the ranks in 1847. He had no special status in the Mormon Church, and there was little to make him stand out in the historical record than that he left what is regarded by many trail historians as one of the best and most informative journals of the early Mormon emigration.

The final book sounds like the most intriguing of the three: Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister, Junius and Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet. The book’s introduction states:

Junius and Joseph examines Joseph Smith’s nearly forgotten [1844] presidential bid, the events leading up to his assassination on June 27, 1844, and the tangled aftermath of the tragic incident. It . . . establishes that Joseph Smith’s murder, rather than being the deadly outcome of a spontaneous mob uprising, was in fact a carefully planned military-style execution. It is now possible to identify many of the key individuals engaged in planning his assassination as well as those who took part in the assault on Carthage jail. And furthermore, this study presents incontrovertible evidence that the effort to remove the Mormon leader from power and influence extended well beyond Hancock County [Illinois] (and included prominent Whig politicians as well as the Democratic governor of the state), thereby transforming his death from an impulsive act by local vigilantes into a political assassination sanctioned by some of the most powerful men in Illinois. The circumstances surrounding Joseph Smith’s death also serve to highlight the often unrecognized truth that a full understanding of early Mormon history can be gained only when considered in the context of events taking place in American society as a whole.

The BYU History Department’s Fall 2004 newsletter reports on several projects of Mormon history by Kathryn Daynes and Ron Walker:

Kathryn Daynes continues her study of Mormon plural marriage in the nineteenth century. She is working on a book with Ben Bennion exploring various facets of polygamy throughout Utah entitled Plural Wives and Tangled Lives: Polygamy’s Place in Mormon Sociey, 1850s-1880s. In addition, Dr. Daynes is writing a book with Sarah Barringer Gordon, Prosecutions of Mormon Polygamists in Utah Territory, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.

Regarding Ron Walker, the newsletter says:

Dr. Walker continues to work on a book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, co-authored with Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in September 2005. His essay on Leonard J. Arrington introduces the University of Illinois’s forthcoming reissue of Great Basin Kingdom, the fourth edition of this classic in western and Mormon historical literature, and he is also working on several projects dealing with the Salt Lake Tabernacle as an example of 19th-century material culture, including a book, article, and video. Finally, Dr. Walker is continuing research and writing on such topics as Brigham Young’s Native American policy, the Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane correspondence, and the LDS Word of Wisdom.

From what I hear, a September 2005 publication date for the book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre is not likely. We’ll see.

A new issue of Mormon Historical Studies, dated Spring 2004, has been posted on the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation website. Some articles I found interesting include David M. Whitchurch, “‘My Dear Sister’: Letters between Joseph F. Smith and His Sister, Martha Ann Smith Harris (1854–1916)”; and Jacob M. Olmstead, “A Victim of the Mormons and The Danites: Images and Relics from Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Mormon Silent Films.&quot Whitchurch’s article features a lightly edited transcription of a letter Joseph F. Smith wrote to his sister, who was two-and-a-half years younger, in 1854, when he was a fifteen-year-old(!) missionary serving in Hawaii. The two continued to write until 1916, two years before President Smith’s death. All together, 167 letters written by Joseph F. Smith and 44 letters written by Martha Ann Smith Harris have been located. They will be published. The 1854 letter appears to have been sent from the island of Lanai. Joseph F. included a lock of his hair with the letter as a “tokun of rememberance.” Olmstead’s article provides a short but intriguing look at the way the church was portrayed by outside filmmakers in the early days of film. Be sure to check out the images showing movie scenes and advertising at the end of the article.