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2020 was a really good year for Mormon Studies, and capped off a decade of fantastic developments and scholarship that I think mean that we can finally retire the nostalgia for the "Camelot years" as a golden age. We're in a golden age that far surpasses that now. 1/
From 1972-82, the LDS Church hired a bunch of historians and others flourished too. This decade became known as "Camelot." It did not come out of no where--professional historians had been training for a while--and it didn't disappear completely. 2/ https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V16N03_11.pdf
Still, it represented an era of freedom before church leaders in the 80s and 90s grew increasingly frustrated that the history they were finding was not particularly "useful" for faith-building. 3/
Since then, scholars have often spoken of a lost era in nostalgic terms, but its worth pointing out that LDS scholarship is incredibly robust right now. In 2020 alone there were a number of groundbreaking books, like @BenjaminEPark "Kingdom of Nauvoo" 4/
Or @_joannabrooks "Mormonism and White Supremacy," or @SaraMPatterson "Pioneers in the Attic," or @WilliamLDavis50 "Visions in a Seer Stone," or Sam Brown, "Joseph Smith's Translation"or the "Palgrave Handbook on Global Mormonism" edited by @rcragun and Gordon and Gary Shepard 5/
and "Routledge Handbook on Mormonism and Gender" edited by myself and @akhoyt1. There were three excellent volumes by Michael MacKay (I guess I should mention I published a book #TabernaclesOfClay this year too). I'm just going off the top of my head so I know I missed some. 6/
Historian @jstuart__ noted about a year ago that the past decade has been one of incredible growth in Mormon Studies institutions, not only in terms of new academic chairs, new journals, new publishing outlets, and more, https://juvenileinstructor.org/mormon-studies-growth-in-the-past-ten-years-institution-building/ 7/
but also the strengthening of the legacy institutions like @DialogueJournal and @MormonHistAssoc and @JMH_Journal and @BYU_Studies , not to mention the maturation of @BYUMaxwell . 8/
So, I'm done with any nostalgia for some lost era of Mormon Studies greatness, and instead want to celebrate all that has happened in this field and all that there is still to come. There are so many amazing scholars and books and projects going on and its extremely fun! 9/9
Ack! I forgot @CJBlythePhD ‘s excellent “Terrible Revolution” which also came out in 2020 and is sitting in my desk 20 inches from my eyes. Apologies!
Argh! I had it in my head that @EastwoodElisa 's revolutionary book *The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer* was 2019, but it was 2020! Chalk that up to pandemic brain. Anyway, a must-read for new Mormon Studies!
