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The forty-first annual meeting of the Mormon History Association will be held at the Hilton Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, May 24-27, 2007. The theme, “Crossroads and Confrontations,” reflects the location of the conference and marks the sesquicentennial of the first major clashes between Mormon Utah and the United States. The Mormon Reformation was underway, highlighting the renewed fervor of a distinctive religious orthodoxy, when in 1857 President James Buchanan ordered the U.S. Army to march toward “rebellious” Utah Territory to enforce national norms. The horrific Mountain Meadows Massacre of that year was one of many manifestations of the ensuing collision between the two cultures. Over the following century and a half, the scene changed considerably, as demonstrated by the seating of Latter-day Saint apostle Reed Smoot in the U. S. Senate in 1907. But adherents of the varieties of Mormonism throughout the world continued to define their own identities in part through encounters between faiths and cultures, the sacred and the secular, and languages and ethnicities. Our theme invites us to consider what we can learn from historic points of contact and interaction—violence, accommodation, and adaptation.
MHA invites and is actively seeking proposals for papers and other presentations for the conference. While we encourage presentations related to the theme, we also welcome other proposals. The program committee will give preference to proposals for full panels of three papers and a discussant for ninety-minute sessions. However, proposals for single papers are also welcome. We also welcome and will seriously consider proposals for historically-based creative presentations in other than the traditional panel format. A proposal form and instructions for submitting proposals will be available at the MHA website, www.mhahome.org.
The deadline for all proposals is October 1, 2006.
Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be mailed by January 15, 2007.
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