Mormon History Insights in the Best Places

I have been finding that one of the best ways to understand Church history is to put people, places, and actions in historical context.  One of the best ways to do that is, of course, to read up on non-Church history from the same time period. 

This was the era of the Underground Railroad.  There were people fighting hard for what they believed in against a sea of hatred.  Those people were called abolitionists.  Or Mormons.  Take your pick.

Mobs were cool for everyone, not just Mormon-haters.  Destroying a printing press seemed like a decent way to show the public's opinion of what someone was printing.  An unjust destroying of a printing press didn't mean that Mormons were around.  It meant that it was the 1830's.  (Elijah Lovejoy's story is WAY more heart-breaking than any Mormon printing press sob story.)

I guess what I'm saying is that Mormons don't have the corner on 1800's suffering.  It was nearly universal.  The more I learn about 1800's America, the more I'm convinced that we're insanely lucky to live now instead of then. 

Newest nugget I've found for helping to put Church history and the peculiar Church language into context comes from Forbidden Signs.  It's a Sign Language book.  See if some of this mid-to-late-1800's talk doesn't strike you as familiar:

"Manualists [or people who advocated for ASL in the classroom, as opposed to oralists who advocated for voicing only] referred to deaf people as members of a "peculiar class" and spoke of sign language as a "peculiar language."  What they meant--what the word had meant for their generation--was that deaf people and sign language were out of the ordinary, remarkable, perhaps unique.  They might also say that sign language was "peculiarly fitted for devotion," meaning that it was particularly so, or discuss the "peculiarities" of a system of teaching, meaning its distinctive aspects.  "Peculiarity" did not carry negative connotations."

Manualists, who had worked so hard to see the Deaf taught in the way they thought was best, were appalled at the new generation of teachers taking that all away.  They saw their treasured high moral standards being eroded by a younger, more superficial, generation.  They saw "a shift from a culture that looked backward to origins to one that looked forward to an every higher ascent; from one that looked within to a core to one that looked outward to behavior; from a culture that valued character to one that valued personality; from a culture that sough essences to one that increasingly gazed upon surfaces."

Wow.  I think the history lesson from that last part is that older generations like to pretend that they are or were moral and upright, and up and coming generations aren't and won't ever be.  For some reason this makes us feel better. 

Huzzah for history!