10-24-2005, 09:43 AM
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Quote:
Originally posted by Snow@Oct 16 2005, 08:31 PM
I'm going to a symposium on Joseph Smith this week and Bushman is one of the speakers so I started reading the book. I am more than a little excited by what's ahead. Have you ever wished for a book about Joseph Smith that gave you the straight dope - what really happened, a book that avoids the misinterpretation and dishonesty of the anti-mormons yet one that isn't whitewashed by the Mormon orthodoxy?
I think this is that book - by a widely respected and ethical historian, who has done all the research, had access to all the documents and Church archives and who writes with compelling prose.
In the prologue Bushman tells on Josiah Quincy's (prominent politician, writer and national commentator) one day encounter with Joseph Smith in Nauvoo (May 1844).* Quincy says that they came to a two-story frame house with a white picket fence and found a group of "rough-looking Mormons" awaiting them...
"Pre-eminent among the stragglers by the door stood a man of commanding appearance, clad in the costume of a journeyman carpenter when about his work. He as hearty, athletic fellow with blue eyes standing prominently out upon his light complexion, a long now and a retreating forehead, He wore striped pantaloons, a linen jacket, which had not lately seen the washtub and a beard of some three day's growth."
Not thrown off by the rough clothes, Quincy remarked that "a fine-looking gentleman is what the passer-by would instinctively have murmured.
Only having met Joseph Smith that one time, Quincy later would write:
"It is by no means improbable that some future text-book, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful* influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet."
The prospect appalled Quincy, but the success of Joseph Smith's Mormonism was not to be denied...
Of the encounter that made such an impression on Quincy, Smith's diary simply says of May 15, 1844, "a son of John Quincy Adams, Mr. Quincy and Dr. Goforth visited the Mansion." Much rain this A.M."
...more later.
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So how did you find the symposium?
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