Archiving Heaven and Earth

About the Book

From the earliest days, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considered the keeping of records both a sacred command and a practical need.

Robin Scott Jensen explores the Church Historian’s Office against the backdrop of how writing and archiving what was written shaped the growth, faith, and identity of the nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint movement. As Jensen shows, records simultaneously created and preserved history. Journal keeping and letter writing stood alongside official documents as an essential means for Saints to understand their mission and place in American society. Over time, the Church Historian’s Office evolved into a powerful institution that guided memory and authority by deciding what to collect, copy, or destroy. Jensen tells the stories of the forgotten archivists, many of them women, who built the Church Historian’s Office, while revealing the choices and conflicts that led to Native and other voices being marginalized or erased.

Detailed and candid, Archiving Heaven and Earth provides a rare look at a foundational organization.