I’ve been waiting for the dust to settle on this madcap idea of not saying “Mormon” when you mean “Mormon”. That’s President Nelson’s personal demon. My gut says be polite and look the other way. Now, we have some guidance from the Associated Press, via the Salt Lake Tribune, and in my case found on…
Quitting Mormon
I don’t remember exactly when I left the Mormon church. 1982 or 1983, probably. I was living in the Avenues area of Salt Lake. The Home Teachers stopped by for the first time ever. I tried to put them off. They weren’t having it. They got pushy. I pushed back. We got to the point…
Defining Public History
Maybe it seems odd to call someone a historian who is not a professor of history giving lectures and writing books. It’s not odd at all. There is academic history, and there is public history. Not really different things, but broadly different ways of engaging with history. “Academics tend to think of public history as…
Old Ballads; Oral History
Milman Parry was a Harvard professor. In the 1930s he traveled through Yugoslavia, collecting ballads and folk songs. As a result of his research into these particular forms of oral history, he developed the idea that Homer’s poems have a formulaic structure that shows they were originally oral compositions. This is one of the stories…
Miss Wolcott’s School Denver
My maternal grandmother, Vivian Luce attended Miss Wolcott’s School for Girls, a finishing school in Denver. She studied things like piano, French, water colors, needlework, elocution, etiquette, and other things appropriate to Edwardian ladies. I estimate she was there about 1914 to 1916. Wikipedia defines finishing schools: “A finishing school is a school for young women that…