A good orientation to the problem of trusting medieval Irish genealogies. Don’t make the mistake of copying what you find online. It’s all very interesting, but it’s not vetted genealogy. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Creating the Past: The Early Irish Genealogical Tradition” in Chronicon 1 (1997) 2: 1-32. ABSTRACT: Traditionally Irish early medieval genealogies...
White indentured servants in Colonial America were not the same as Black slaves.
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 Mormonism Research Ministry a year after it was news...
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 where I told them to remove me from the membership rolls. They asked me to write a letter. I wrote it...
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 a field of study, like one of the nearly 300 specialized subjects that...