Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image PDF Author: Mary Campbell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641017X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elements of their belief system for national acceptance, the Mormons recreated themselves as model Americans. Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church’s favorite photographers, Johnson (1857–1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism’s most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his “spicy pictures of girls.” Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation’s mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image PDF Author: Mary Campbell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641017X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elements of their belief system for national acceptance, the Mormons recreated themselves as model Americans. Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church’s favorite photographers, Johnson (1857–1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism’s most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his “spicy pictures of girls.” Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation’s mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image PDF Author: Mary Campbell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
One of the church's favorite photographers, Johnson (1857-1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism's most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his "spicy pictures of girls." Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation's mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. --Publisher description.

Exalted Bodies

Exalted Bodies PDF Author: Mary Katherine Campbell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Polygamy
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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Book Description
On September 24, 1890, the then president, prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church, Wilford Woodruff, made an announcement. "I have arived [sic], " he declared, "at a point in the History of my life as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints whare [sic] I am under the necessity of acting for the Temporal salvation of the Church." Finally succumbing to almost four decades of the larger nation's anti-polygamy assault, Woodruff sought to save his religion by relinquishing plural marriage. In so doing, however, he profoundly altered the very nature of Mormonism itself. Because in renouncing the practice of polygamy, the LDS church did not simply disavow an unorthodox family structure. To the contrary, it abandoned perhaps the central doctrine of its founding theology -- a theology rooted in an intoxicating vision of the male body and that body's sexualized capacity to do nothing less than make heaven on earth. This dissertation examines both this vision and its loss through the work of the little-known Mormon artist Charles Ellis Johnson (1857-1926). Church photographer, Holy Land traveler, and, perhaps surprisingly, erotic stereographer, Johnson made pictures that both restage Mormonism's original, polygamous dreams and reveal the extent to which the country shattered these dreams when they broke the LDS to monogamy. More than this, Johnson's images simultaneously disclose how the nation's brutal anti-polygamy war rooted itself in not simply terror and revulsion but also a delicious myth of the manly Saint. Focusing on Johnson's Holy Land work and his erotic stereographs, I examine the way in which Mormon polygamy spoke to such collective fantasies of manhood, power, and, ultimately, the creative impulse itself; I examine, in other words, the way in which plural marriage never existed as an isolated religious event but rather belonged to an historical, cultural, and social vista that encompassed phenomena as diverse as minstrelsy, the New Woman, dude ranches, and even Emerson.

Latter-Day Saint Art

Latter-Day Saint Art PDF Author: Amanda K. Beardsley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197632505
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader seeks to fill a substantial gap by providing a comprehensive examination of the visual art of the Latter-day Saints from the nineteenth century to the present. The volume includes twenty-two essays examining art by, for, or about Mormons, as well as over 200 high-quality color illustrations.

Selling Sex in Utah: A History of Vice

Selling Sex in Utah: A History of Vice PDF Author: Eileen Hallet Stone
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 146714911X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Uncovering Sin, Scandal and Sensuality In the late 1840s, the new frontier west of the Missouri River opened its floodgates to opportunity and adventure. In a new land, where men were lonely and women scarce, prostitutes poured in to ply their trade wherever they could--under trees, in wagons or random shanties. Within decades, prostitution expanded into cities and towns. Red light districts, brothels and cribs sprouted like wildflowers. Ogden's notorious madam Belle London enticed Salt Lake Councilmen to hire her to oversee their one hundred fifty room crib stockade. Park City's Mother Urban successfully defended her sixteen row houses as "necessities" for thousands of miners. The ballyhooed brothels of Helper stimulated "hunting trips" for Salt Lake men willing to travel for sex. Award-winning author Eileen Hallet Stone combed newspapers, archives and court cases to examine the lives, equity and infamy of Utah prostitution.

Print the Legend

Print the Legend PDF Author: Martha A. Sandweiss
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300103151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Resurrecting scores of rare images of the 19th century American West, "Print the Legend" offers engaging tales of ambitious photographic adventurers, and misinterpreted images. Chronicling both the history of a place and the history of a medium, this book portrays how Americans first came to understand western photos and to envision their expanding nation. 138 illustrations.

Railroading Religion

Railroading Religion PDF Author: David Walker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469653214
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonism's ascendency in the railroad era. The center of his story is Corinne, Utah—an end-of-the-track, hell-on-wheels railroad town founded by anti-Mormon businessmen. In the disputes over this town's frontier survival, Walker discovers intense efforts by a variety of theological, political, and economic interest groups to challenge or secure Mormonism's standing in the West. Though Corinne's founders hoped to leverage industrial capital to overthrow Mormon theocracy, the town became the site of a very different dream. Economic and political victory in the West required the production of knowledge about different religious groups settling in its lands. As ordinary Americans advanced their own theories about Mormondom, they contributed to the rise of religion itself as a category of popular and scholarly imagination. At the same time, new and advantageous railroad-related alliances catalyzed LDS Church officials to build increasingly dynamic religious institutions. Through scrupulous research and wide-ranging theoretical engagement, Walker shows that western railroads did not eradicate or diminish Mormon power. To the contrary, railroad promoters helped establish Mormonism as a normative American religion.

Mormon Visual Culture and the American West

Mormon Visual Culture and the American West PDF Author: Nathan Rees
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000349799
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book explores the place of art in Latter-day Saint society during the first 50 years of the Utah settlement, beginning in 1847. Nathan Rees uncovers the critical role that images played in nineteenth-century Mormon religion, politics, and social practice. These artists not only represented, but actively participated in debates about theology, politics, race, gender, and sexuality at a time when Latter-day Saints were grappling with evolving doctrine, conflict with Native Americans, and political turmoil resulting from their practice of polygamy. The book makes an important contribution to art history, Mormon studies, American studies, and religious studies.

Marianne Meets the Mormons

Marianne Meets the Mormons PDF Author: Heather Belnap
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053699
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, a fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made Mormons and Mormonism a common trope in French journalism, art, literature, politics, and popular culture. Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper, and Daryl Lee bring to light French representations of Mormonism from the 1830s to 1914, arguing that these portrayals often critiqued and parodied French society. Mormonism became a pretext for reconsidering issues such as gender, colonialism, the family, and church-state relations while providing artists and authors with a means for working through the possibilities of their own evolving national identity. Surprising and innovative, Marianne Meets the Mormons looks at how nineteenth-century French observers engaged with the idea of Mormonism in order to reframe their own cultural preoccupations.

The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender

The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender PDF Author: Taylor G. Petrey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351181580
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1315

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender is an outstanding reference source to this controversial subject area. Since its founding in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has engaged gender in surprising ways. LDS practice of polygamy in the nineteenth century both fueled rhetoric of patriarchal rule as well as gave polygamous wives greater autonomy than their monogamous peers. The tensions over women’s autonomy continued after polygamy was abandoned and defined much of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s, Mormon feminists came into direct confrontation with the male Mormon hierarchy. These public clashes produced some reforms, but fell short of accomplishing full equality. LGBT Mormons have a similar history. These movements are part of the larger story of how Mormonism has managed changing gender norms in a global context. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into four parts: • Methodological issues • Historical approaches • Social scientific approaches • Theological approaches. These sections examine central issues, debates, and problems, including: agency, feminism, sexuality and sexual ethics, masculinity, queer studies, plural marriage, homosexuality, race, scripture, gender and the priesthood, the family, sexual violence, and identity. The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, gender studies, and women’s studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, politics, anthropology, and sociology.