This week on The Joseph Smith Papers:

stepping inside the project, who does it, and why it matters.

If you're trying to account for the power and assets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

you probably won't find it here.

Former Church President Gordon B. Hinckley said you’ll instead find it in the conviction of each member of the Church, no matter where they are.

But if you wanted to find the power of the past, well,

this would be a pretty good place to start.

In the east wing of the 26-story Church Office Building in Salt Lake City is the archives of the LDS Church’s History Department. Contained within a relatively small and secure area

is most of what we've referred to as the Joseph Smith papers.

And for the last few years,

those papers have gotten far more attention than at any other time in the past. In this segment of The Joseph Smith Papers series,

we take a side road from the early events portrayed through the papers.

We'll talk to some of the scholars who do the hard work of bringing this ambitious project together.

They're the ones with the tired eyes,

the ones who've come to know Joseph Smith in a way that very few others will by painstakingly poring over these documents that the Prophet either produced or owned.

They'll talk about how they do their work and what they're learning from the process.

Heading this panel is Ronald K. Esplin,

managing editor of the Papers Project and also a general editor along with Dean Jessee and Richard Bushman.

Karen Lynn Davidson is coeditor of volume 1 of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers.

Steven Harper is a coeditor on three different volumes of the Papers and also an associate professor of LDS Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University.

Robin Jensen specializes in document and transcription analysis and is coeditor of two volumes of the Papers Project.

And finally, Eric Smith is senior production and copy editor for the Joseph Smith Papers and also an editor for the Church’s Curriculum Department.

To this point in The Joseph Smith Papers series programs,

we have been able to share some of the findings about Joseph Smith and early Mormon history that the Joseph Smith Papers scholars and their colleagues have uncovered.

We haven't yet been able to share any vision of what

the Joseph Smith Papers Project is really about— what is documentary editing, and how do the scholars go about their work?

We've assembled this panel to try and introduce documentary editing

and help you understand why it's important, why we are investing the resources, and what the end result will be

in addition to more information about Joseph Smith’s life,

much of which may get shared later in this series.

The panel have each had interesting personal experiences that taught them at one point or another in their careers about the importance of the documents

and the importance of documentary editing,

and we’ve invited each to say something about that personal connection to the field,

the scholarly field of documentary editing, and I want to begin with my own,

which goes back a long while. When I was at the University of Virginia in 1969 and 70,

I was in a position to write a quick thesis,

if I could do that, and get out of there with a master’s degree in about a year, but that depended on the unlikely success of finding a topic in a senior paper, a seminar paper, that I could turn into a thesis within that year.

And I happened on a topic that I could do that with, and I could do it not because I was brilliant or energetic,

but because I chose a topic, I think by accident

—a blessing in my life, whatever you want to call it— for which the work had been done by the folks that did the Benjamin Franklin Papers.

Those folks were headed up by a man named Leonard Labaree.

And in my carrel at the University of Virginia Alderman Library, I had 11 volumes, brown volumes just like this. Not this one.

This one was published in 2005, volume 36. Mine were the first 11 volumes of the Benjamin Franklin Papers.

And I went to the New York Public Library, found interesting things. I went to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, went to the Library of Congress.

But I could do my thesis because I had these books that covered the early part of Benjamin Franklin's life. And my thesis topic was young Benjamin Franklin.

And so I understood very early that, in my case, and I’m sure in many others, I was able to do something better,

quicker, and indeed something that I probably could not even begin to have done at that point without the work of the documentary editors who have gone before me. Now, I had one other experience at the University of Virginia that reinforced this,

and that was a publication of a biography on Brigham Young by Alfred Knopf, a national publisher,

by a well-known scholar backed by

an important prestigious fellowship. And he did his work by researching in the New York Public Library.

He made a little trip out West to the Mormons and professed to not have had a lot of cooperation,

went back home, and found a treasure trove of all those documents written by Brigham Young’s enemies—

that is, the correspondents that wrote against Utah and the Mormons in the 19th century—

and wrote his biography out of that wonderful collection. And it is a wonderful collection.

But to think you would write a biography without Brigham Young's own papers,

it's just unthinkable today.

And three years later, I was working at the Church archives, and we symbolically dedicated a room to the sources that this author did not use.

So from that moment on,

I understood documentary editing was essential.

If he had had a shelf full of Brigham Young documents,

he could not have ignored them.

He could get away with that because they weren't out there.

So our task, and the one I’ve set for myself to be part of, is to present scholars who care about

early Mormon history—Mormons and non-Mormons—

the documents so they can do what I did: a better

work, quicker, and probably a different work than they could do without it. And I know Robin had somewhat different experience with his master’s thesis. And please tell us about that.

Yeah. Here I was working on a thesis, excited to do the work,

probably energetic, willing to do the work,

but the collection I wanted to get into was on the East Coast in Yale, a fantastic collection there of papers.

And there were some in the Midwest as well, but here I was in Utah working on a thesis, and as a graduate student, you don't get much funding for travel.

So I wasn't able to make it out there very often, but I was able to get a microfilm of this entire collection at Yale.

It was tremendous to go through these papers

a thousand miles away from where they were actually held. But, for those of you that have worked in microfilm, it’s not the most pleasant thing—

dark, it strains your eyes a bit. But this microfilm basically helped me write my thesis. But had someone come up with a published volume of these papers,

it wouldn't have taken me a second to throw the microfilm away and use that published volume.

It’s what we work at. What we’re all about is really access.

We provide access for these documents for other scholars to use. The microfilm did it to some extent. I had access to the papers that I wouldn't have had otherwise, but a published volume would have saved me hours and hours and hours of strained eyes hunched over the microfilm reader. Today, you're a text expert, one of our text verifiers.

Back then, the handwriting must have been a challenge. I was unfamiliar with 19th-century handwriting at the time, so, in addition to working on a microfilm, I had to basically learn 19th-century handwriting.

Steve, Dr. Harper, of BYU, you’ve had some experience with documentary editing that go back a ways. In fact, it’s surprising to me how far back they go. As I think about it, I got my first opportunity to work in document editing in the 1990s when I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young. And Jan Shipps, a terrific scholar of Mormonism, was working together with BYU Studies on an edition of the William McClellin journals, which had recently been discovered in the Church’s collection. The McLellin journals were controversial,

or I should say their reputation was controversial. The journals themselves are decidedly uncontroversial,

which I found out for my very own self as I read them. So it became my opportunity to sit with Professor Shipps

and verify the transcription that we'd been given of the journals.

And I assume we’ll talk more about that wonderful,

painstaking process of transcription as we go along today.

There’s really no other way to get that intimate with documents than the transcription process, the close and careful reading.

And so, through that opportunity to read with such an impressive scholar, I learned so much from her.

I learned an awful lot about sources of knowledge,

how we know and understand history.

So for a history undergraduate trying to come of age,

it was a wonderful formative experience for me, and

I’ll never—well, it’s shaped my life ever since, as a historian.

Karen has done her graduate work and degrees in English, but has been a writer of history for a long time, since your book on the history of the hymns. I know you've been involved in history probably before.

As an English scholar coming to history,

how does documentary editing connect with your life? Some of the skills required are very similar.

I read things carefully, I try to develop an understanding and an appreciation, and I try to make comments that will be helpful. But about a year ago, a friend of mine said to me, “That volume, that Joseph Smith volume that you're working on, are you still working on that?” And then she went on to say, “Well, I can understand why it takes so much time correcting all those spelling mistakes and everything.”

And it really struck me how difficult a concept documentary editing is for many people.

And I think the problem lies in the word “editing.”

When we think of editing, we think of fixing something up, making it polished, correcting the spelling, fixing any roughness. And documentary editing is not only different from that, it’s just, in a way, it’s the opposite of that,

because a documentary editor has to ensure—we’ve used the word “verify” several times already in this discussion— has to ensure, has to verify, that what is on the printed page is what was in the original document.

And I brought a kind of an object lesson with me today.

This is a piece of documentary editing, self-contained in one volume: the diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions. And Patty Sessions was a very well-known figure in early Mormon history. She was the pioneer midwife who delivered thousands of babies.

And we read on the cover of the book, “Edited by Donna Toland Smart.” Now, if I thought that editing meant fix-up editing, as opposed to documentary editing,

if I thought that meant fix-up editing, then I open this book,

and I’m shocked, I’m just stunned by what I see.

Why didn’t this editor catch these things? Didn’t she know that days of

the week were supposed to be capitalized?

What about these spelling errors, the apostrophe errors? Well,

if that’s my response, it’s because I don’t understand what documentary editing is.

I promise you that Donna Smart knows that days of the week are supposed to be capitalized.

But it was her job to defend Patty Sessions’s handwritten

originals against any effort to improve them in quotation marks

or to correct things or to change what Patty had there. And I realize more and more in the documentary editing work that there is a certain kind of closeness that you can achieve by having

an untampered-with text. No one has tried to fix it up.

Eric, your job is to see that, at the end of the day, we have done right and that the production process includes careful comparisons back to the original,

applying our style guide, getting every jot and tittle right, and a proofread several times.

How does your editor’s eye and editor’s skill

connect you with the documents and what have you learned in that process? For a number of years before I associated with the project, I worked as a professional editor, which I continue to do,

and I worked on a number of significant projects and publications dealing with Mormon history and in particular with Joseph Smith's history. And in that work on these various significant Church history publications, I came to really rely on

the great contributions that have been made in Mormon history by those who have gone before us, if you will.

I wanted to point out a couple of the sources that I have used most in my editing.

One of these is the Manuscript History of the Church,

and I actually brought a copy of it with me, or a part of it.

The Manuscript History of the Church was initiated in

the spring of 1838 by Joseph Smith,

and he began dictating it to his scribe, George Robinson.

And this work continued under Joseph Smith's direction,

as you know, till the end of his life. And the work was finished in Salt Lake by compilers and historians.

The first part of this History is

an original history in that Joseph Smith was dictating to his scribes his early religious experiences.

And this journal begins with the familiar words “Owing to the many reports,” and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will recognize those words because those are the same words that begin

the Joseph Smith—History in the Pearl of Great Price.

As this History continued,

it became became a secondary history in the sense that the compilers began collecting documents that were in existence and putting those together into a documentary history.

They took journal entries, letters sent, letters received, certificates, and many other kinds of documents

and arranged those into a chronological order.

So in the early part of the History,

you have original material from Joseph Smith, and as the History continues, you have a secondary history.

So we have information here about Joseph Smith’s early religious experience that is available nowhere else.

And, as far as it being a secondary history, it's a wonderful window or gateway to give us access to the original documents that lie behind this.

The one other source I wanted to mention that I came to rely a lot on in my editing before I joined the project or became associated with the project is the work of Dean Jessee. Dean’s works include The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith and the two volumes, The Papers of Joseph Smith.

And I found that, when I was doing research or editing on any kind of Joseph Smith document,

if that document had been included in one of Dean's books, then I was in luck because he prepares a careful transcription of the original. Also the annotation in Dean’s volumes contextualizes the documents, helps you understand the historical setting in which they were produced, can help identify people and places that are mentioned in these.

When we finish our Histories series, you can have another several books on your shelf and you don't need a special shelf full of manuscripts. That’s right. That’ll help you and many others of us. Indeed. I have 10 or 12 manuscripts printed out in this size. And when we get done with our work on the Joseph Smith Papers Project, those volumes will replace all these scraps of paper

that fill many of our offices.

I want to take a few moments and look at where our modern documentary editing came from,

and therefore we can understand the context for what Dean Jessee has done

and what we’re trying to do now in a broader project.

Documentary editing in the modern age and English-speaking world, in the United States at least, begins with Julian Boyd.

And he had the idea on the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth that he wanted to do a modern edition of all the surviving papers of Thomas Jefferson.

He began, then, in 1943, and he got his first volume out, which is right here. He got this volume out in 1950—seven years gathering material, organizing them, transcribing,

getting a team to help him,

and he got his first volume out. That is worn out, been re-covered,

but that’s the original 1950 publication.

This is volume 32, published a couple years ago,

and they're still at it.

This only goes to the first part of the Jefferson presidency, and much more still to come.

How significant was that, and what followed:

the Benjamin Franklin, the George Washington,

the James Madison, the John Adams, religious figures like Roger Williams. That was significant in setting an entirely new standard. In February,

there was a hearing before Congress on documentary editing.

The purpose was to try to resolve the tension between the scholars who were going too slow and the people who want to use them, who say, “Faster, faster, we need these done. 58 years already is enough.”

And David McCullough was among those who testified.

Also Dr. Ralph Ketcham.

Here is one paragraph from Dr. Ketcham: “The founding editors” —Julian Boyd and these other early editors—“developed materials

and methods and benchmarks of thoroughness and accuracy for documentary publication that were so path-breaking that all previous such publications were rendered inadequate and incomplete

and all subsequent such publications had to try to live up to those standards.”

And that's the standard we have to live up to,

even possibly to improve, in some senses; after 50 years, we’ve all learned some things, and the folks, including the Thomas Jefferson editor, Barbara Oberg, who has consulted with us, do things a little differently than Julian Boyd did.

But that standard’s a high standard, and it does render everything else obsolete.

Here is an example of that.

This is only one of the efforts to share the Jonathan Edwards papers.

This happens to be an 1830 publication of the works of Jonathan Edwards.

The original was published in the 18th century.

This is a 19th-century version.

It’s obsolete, and the current Jonathan Edwards folks are publishing a set that looks like this.

And they also are in the business that we are, and we’ve consulted together.

They’ve given us a great deal of advice from their experience.

But this version is obsolete, good as it was for its time,

and this version will replace it.

Here’s another interesting example:

The Wesley Journals.

The founder of Methodism was important enough that, in the 19th century, they did this version of his journals.

This is an early 19th-century version.

Here is an early-20th-century version.

Here is the modern edition that will supplant all of the earlier works because it's based on this new standard.

These all, interestingly, begin with the same journal entry,

but published with different standards and different information around it. It helps update things.

So the purpose of showing these is to suggest a couple of things.

One, it underscores Dr. Ketcham's conclusion that all the other things are now obsolete, because we have standards that are different and essential, that we must follow them now to be credible and to be useful to scholars.

The other is to suggest we haven't yet done very well for Joseph Smith the first time,

let alone the second or the third time. Dean Jessee got started.

But it’s not a one man project, and we need to continue and build on that. And that's the charter of the Joseph Smith Papers Project today.

I want to share one other thing out of the February hearings before Congress. This is David McCullough.

He’s on the side of “Oh, hurry up if you can,

but don’t dumb them down.

I need these works the way they’ve been written.”

He said this: “The countless number of historians, biographers, scholars, and students who have drawn again and again on the great wealth of material to be found in these incomparable volumes.” Why they’re valuable? “Their value is unassailable, immeasurable. They are superbly edited.

They are thorough. They are accurate.

The footnotes are pure gold;”

—Imagine that: somebody who loves footnotes—

“many are masterpieces of close scholarship.”

“I know how essential,” he says, “these papers are to our understanding those great Americans and their time.”

And, in the same sense, the Joseph Smith papers are essential to understanding Joseph Smith and his time and the foundings of Mormonism.

“The men and women who have devoted themselves to the publication of the papers are not only skilled editors, they are dedicated scholars.

Their standards are the highest,

their knowledge of the subjects often surpass that of anyone.

They are the best in the business,” and basically says, don't dumb it down just to speed it up.

And he gives a little interesting illustration of building another airfield instead of trying to crowd more planes onto the same one. If we have to get it out faster, more funds, more scholars, but do it right.

Robin, we're not writing narrative history. It’s not something that you are going to sit down and read like a novel. And it isn’t documentary history either. Could you say something about the difference between documentary editing and documentary history?

Yeah, there is a distinct difference, although perhaps at first blush people might not know the difference. But documentary history is where you take a certain subject or individual and collect

as many primary documents as you can about that individual.

So if we were creating a documentary history of Joseph Smith, we would pull in journals from all of his contemporaries— Oliver Cowdery, William McLellin—

letters that people were writing back and forth about Joseph, minutes concerning meetings that he was there. But the big difference is that Joseph Smith is not

an active creator of these documents. So a documentary edition,

we focus on the individual as a creator of documents.

So Joseph Smith wrote a letter to his brother Hyrum.

We published that as a Joseph Smith document because Joseph Smith is creating it.

But if Oliver Cowdery writes a letter to Hyrum Smith and they’re talking about Joseph Smith and some of the things they're involved with,

we do not publish it because that is not a creation of Joseph Smith. And they also matter to everybody who cares about accuracy and truth. We want every reader to have confidence that we’ve jumped through the hoops and we’ve done it right.

That's the reason we took the trouble to get certified by the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, which is an arm of the National Archives. The highest credential we could have.

The highest credential for this sort of thing. We want everyone to have confidence that we have done this right. And they did have confidence from our plans and our staff and our style guide that we are doing it right.

I think there are other reasons that matters for Latter-day Saints generally,

and part of it is we want to have confidence when we open these books that we’re getting the history the way it was written, the documents the way they were.

But there's another sense.

When you hold a manuscript that Oliver Cowdery wrote as Joseph Smith dictated,

you have a piece of real connection to a past we care about, and it’s not faked. In today’s world, so much is virtual, it’s hard to know what you can really count on. Visually, you can’t count on what you see.

And I think that sense of having a real connection back to the past is essential, and these documents help do that.

That’s something you convey to your students, I believe, when you teach Church history. I try to. For those of us who believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for followers of Joseph Smith, it's not just an interesting past. It’s an essential past for salvation.

And we believe that for a very long time, there was no gospel fully restored.

And if we didn’t have Joseph Smith’s documents, then it might just as well still be that way.

I wouldn’t know Joseph Smith had a First Vision or translated the Book of Mormon or received revelations unless those things got written down. I can’t interview him.

And so, to me, it’s even more than the papers of George Washington, whom I revere, or Thomas Jefferson,

whose philosophy is the foundation of the American republic. For Joseph Smith, the papers are the testimony through which I find my way to God. And to me, that’s the enormous importance of the Joseph Smith papers.

Eric showed us the Manuscript History, that great big O on the first page, “Owing to the many reports.”

Well, think about what Joseph tells us in that line. Owing to the many reports that are not right, I'm going to write this history or cause it to be written.

Well, if we didn't have that history, if we didn't have Joseph's effort to accurately tell his own story,

we might as well be back a thousand years ago.

Now you know the whats and the whys of the project. Next week,

how these scholars do their work. Next week on The Joseph Smith Papers.