NOTICES
Westerns: A Women’s History By Victoria Lamont
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Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xii + 194 pp. Cloth, $55.00.
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Westerns: A Women’s History is a series of case studies about women writers of westerns at the turn of the twentieth century. Victoria Lamont aims to incorporate women authors’ influence on western fiction to debunk the perception that western writing and mythology has been solely a male profession. She describes how popular westerns emerged during a time of “frontier anxiety” after Fredrick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and the perceived closure of the West. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show helped to preserve western mythology and elevated masculinity with the myth of the cowboy, which overshadowed women’s frontier experiences. Lamont juxtaposes male western authors’ themes with the themes from overlooked women writers. Men tended to focus on outlaw violence, vigilante justice, and class lines between cowboys and ranchers. Women writers chose subjects that evoked the “frontier heroine” through populism, suffrage, and moral authority. Lamont also claims that women writers had a more complex understanding of gender and racial hierarchies in the West. Overall, Westerns is designed to help readers rethink how women have been portrayed in western fiction and how an emphasis on female writers can help create a more accurate portrayal of gender history in the West.
A Kingdom Transformed: Early Mormonism and the Modern LDS Church, 2nd edition By Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. xxii + 406. Paper, $35.00.
The original edition of a Kingdom Transformed, written by the sociologists Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, is a linguistic analysis of conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) from 1830 to 1979. It demonstrates how LDS leaders adjusted their language to develop and modernize the church from a fringe religious movement into a successful, mainstream, and international religion. The second edition incorporates new data from 1980 to 2009, offering a comprehensive account of changes in church themes over time. Shepherd and Shepherd use a new coding method from Brigham Young University’s LDS General Conference Corpus that digitally tracks conference rhetoric, whereas the first edition used human coders. Shepherd and Shepherd offer a brief history of the LDS church and describe how its doctrine and practices evolved with anti-polygamy legislation and pressure to conform to a broader national identity in order to achieve statehood for Utah, specifically the church’s shift from collective ideologies to an emphasis on American individualism. Through rhetorical analysis, Shepherd and Shepherd illustrate the power that church leaders had in navigating and adapting doctrine to survive and even flourish in nineteenth and twentieth century America.
