Archiving Heaven and Earth
The Historian's Office and the Making of Mormonism
How the Historian’s Office became a gatekeeper of history and memory
Cloth – $125
978-0-252-05998-8
Paper – $32
978-0-252-08983-1
eBook – $29.95
978-0-252-04940-8
Publication Date
Paperback: 03/16/2027
Cloth: 03/16/2027
Cloth: 03/16/2027
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.
About the Author
Robin Scott Jensen is a historian and archivist at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History Library.Reviews
“In this dynamic and highly readable book, Robin Jensen shows how, between the death of Joseph Smith in 1844 and the dedication of a new church headquarters in Salt Lake City in 1917, a succession of church historians and archivists helped place history at the center of Mormon faith. They created, preserved, and culled manuscripts; cut and pasted ephemera into scrapbooks; fashioned timelines, lineages, and affidavits; and in multiple ways made history matter not just to church leaders but to their fellow saints. Yes, they colonized Native American records and muted the voices of women, but it is worth asking whether history, as they understood it, remains at the center of Latter-day Saint faith today.”—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812
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