The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 1: July 1828–June 1831 ed. by Michael Hubbard MacKay, et al.

248 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Iowa Indians, the first of their people to visit Montreal, prior to participating in the siege. They had traveled some 1,500 miles and, perhaps, would have known of Burial 14’s people. By framing this new story of Burial 14 within scholarship that emphasizes the broader context of the Seven Years’ War, we can see Fort William Henry as a place that embodied the powerful forces of colonialism that were remaking a continent and pulling an extraordinarily diverse group of people from across America and the Atlantic Ocean to meet at one fateful spot, in what Europeans considered a wilderness, along the shores of Lake George. As a book aimed at the general public, The Legacy of Fort William Henry would benefit from additional narratives that connect the fort, its artifacts, and the people buried there to the dynamic, uncertain, and expansive world of the Seven Years’ War. Starbuck sees Fort William Henry as significant to this broader world, but in the final chapter on the fort’s enduring importance, he offers a surprisingly American legacy for an outpost in what many scholars see as the first “world war.” He concludes: “I believe that the soldiers and officers who lived and fought at Fort William Henry were most likely very much like us, and their sacrifices helped us become the Americans we are today.” He adds that these men “fought to maintain their identity as an English-speaking people” and “to keep English customs and laws” (99). Although Starbuck wants to move beyond a Last of the Mohicans memory of Fort William Henry, these final thoughts would be very much at home in a classic Hollywood epic. The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 1: July 1828–June 1831 Edited by Michael Hubbard MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley. Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2013, 640 pages, $54.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Matthew Bowman, Henderson State University The Joseph Smith Papers Project employs several dozen researchers and editors, at least a dozen with PhDs in history and many more with documentary editing and archival training. It is housed in and funded by the Library and Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (along with a large bequest from Larry Miller, the recently deceased owner Book Reviews 249 of the Utah Jazz NBA team), and all Project employees are members of the church. However, the Project has received wide praise: it won endorsement from the prestigious National Historical Publications and Records Commission for its meticulous professionalism, and counts the respected historians Harry Stout and Stephen Stein on its board of editors. For more than a decade now, the Project’s researchers have assembled, transcribed, and annotated all extant documents relating to Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism. The first volume appeared in 2008. The Project has to date released portions of four of the six series of books expected, the Histories (various histories Joseph Smith produced about his life and his church), Journals (Smith’s diaries and the official journals kept in his name by his secretaries), Revelations and Translations (several volumes transcribing the handwritten pronouncements Joseph Smith claimed to have received under divine inspiration), and Documents (a miscellany of letters, revelations, and uncollected papers, including this volume). The Legal and Business Records series and volumes collecting Administrative Records are still in preparation. There are some 8,500 extant Joseph Smith documents, and while the most important will be published in the twenty or so print volumes expected by the end of the decade, many more will appear on the Project’s website. The introduction to this volume describes the Documents series as the “core series” of the entire project, presenting “in chronological order with historical introductions and annotation most of the extant (or surviving ) documents owned, created, or authorized by Smith,” with only a few exceptions (xvii). This volume, and others in the series, include letters, articles produced for publication, minutes, and transcriptions of discourses and of revelations. Some of the last also appear in the Revelations and Translations series; many revelations were edited over time and some exist in multiple...

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