Topics for oral presentations. Report on most recent
scholarship about one of the following: (Must consult 2 sources in
addition to Wikipedia -- such as newspapers, Utah History
Encyclopedia, JSTOR.)
- Mountain Meadows Massacre/John D. Lee
- United Order/Orderville
- Iosepa
- J. Golden Kimball
- Jesse Knight
- Short Creek
- Jedidiah Smith
- Corrine
- Bingham Canyon
- Rafael Lopez
- Butch Cassidy
- John Wesley Powell
- Earl Douglas
- Everett Ruess
Accompanied by 1-page handout: may include images, short
timeline, short bio. Must include citations of sources consulted.
Where others saw only sage, a salt lake, and a great desert, the
Mormons saw their "lovely Deseret," a land of lilacs, honeycombs,
poplars, and fruit trees. Unwelcome in Illinois and Missouri, they
migrated to the dry lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada
to establish Mormon country, a wasteland made green. Like the
land they settled, the Mormons' habits stood in stark contrast to
the frenzied recklessness of the American West. Opposed to the often
prodigal individualism of the West, Mormons lived in closely
knit—some say ironclad—communities. The story of Mormon country is
one of self-sacrifice and labor spent in the search for an ideal in
the most forbidding territory of the American West
Response Paper #2: Consider one of the descriptions of in
Etulain's introduction and explain how Stegner's book has taken you
into Mormon Country:
- admiration of Mormon cooperation -- in contrast to the
destructiveness of rugged individualism which was part of the
myth of the West
- synecdoche: using a part to illustrate the whole
- making connections between past and present -- Stegner using
his own present day experiences