Editor’s note: This is the tenth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Spencer W. McBride (@SpencerWMcBride on Twitter) is a documentary editor and historian of U.S. religion and political culture. Here’s how he does history.
What’s your current position? How long have you worked there and is this your first connection with the organization?
I am an Associate Managing Historian of the Joseph Smith Papers. I have been with this project for six years. I started in 2014, just one month after I finished my PhD. While I had enjoyed perusing the Joseph Smith Papers for research purposes, or just out of curiosity, I had no connection with the project prior to applying for an open historian position.
Tell our readers what a typical day or week of work is like for you. Is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
I have found that in documentary editing there isn’t really a typical day. A lot of it depends on where we are as a team on the process of preparing a volume of documents for publication. So, if we are in the early stages of the process, I spend a lot of time with document control (identifying and organizing all surviving Joseph Smith documents in a certain time period) and transcript verification (working with the original document to make sure that our transcripts are accurate). These tasks can be tedious at times, but they are essential and there is still a thrill in working so closely with original historical documents.
Then, as we get further along in the publishing process, I research each document assigned to me so that I can write a brief historical introduction explaining its creation, transmission, and reception. This process also includes writing footnotes to explain references in the text or to identify people, places, and events that it mentions. Sometimes this requires me to dive deep into a subject I know little about for just one footnote! And I often enjoy that. For example, in a recent volume of the Joseph Smith Papers there is an 1842 letter in response to a correspondent who mulled over potential materials that could be used to build the roof of the temple the Latter-day Saints were building in Nauvoo, Illinois. He proposed using tin and suggested possible places to obtain that material, including Cornwall, England. I knew little about tin mining and tin prices in the 1840s, but after a fascinating few hours I had done enough research on this subject to write a footnote to help researchers using this volume to better contextualize the conversation preserved in these letters.
You’re the Associate Managing Historian of the Joseph Smith Papers. Tell us what it means to manage a person’s papers.
The goal of the Joseph Smith Papers project is simple: to publish accurate transcripts of every surviving document created by or for Joseph Smith.1 For those who may not know, Smith was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (church’s members are sometimes called Latter-day Saints or Mormons). This line of work is known as documentary editing and the Joseph Smith Papers project is modeled after several iconic projects in the field such as the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Papers of John Adams. The goals of all such projects are generally similar: to publish the papers of historically significant individuals. And documentary editing projects focus on more than just political figures. Many writers, social reformers, and political activists are the focus of papers projects. So are many religious figures, such as Joseph Smith.
But, as straightforward as our goal may be, it requires a lot of work and a lot of historians to accomplish it. Approximately 13,000 Joseph Smith documents survived. These include journals, letters, deeds, receipts, invitations, legal documents, and more. The project requires us to identify and locate every surviving document, transcribe the text and then draft annotations to explain and contextualize the document for researchers. We then publish the annotated papers in print and online.
I find the work incredibly rewarding. Not only do I have an office in a library surrounded by books and old records, but as historians immersed in the documentary record we make discoveries large and small. And then, to see scholars use the papers in their own research to produce groundbreaking history with that research is something we celebrate.
To undertake this work, we have a large staff of 15 historians, most of whom have PhDs. So, in that sense, our project is larger than many history departments at universities and colleges in the United States. In addition, the project employs a large editorial team that works on checking the footnotes, copy-editing the annotations, and type setting the volumes ahead of publication. My work on the project includes that of a historian working with the original documents to prepare them for publication as well as that of an administrator, supervising the work of some of my fellow historians.
Many volumes make up the Joseph Smith Papers. Spencer is part of the team that assembles, edits, and writes about the papers for use by scholars.
Have you always been interested in history? If so, what’s your earliest memory about a historical topic or event?
I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in history. I think this may have something to do with the number of extended family members who studied history in college before going on to careers in different fields. My father often spoke about historical topics and we would frequently visit historical markers and sites while on road trips. In fact, I have vivid memories of visiting most of the Catholic missions in California built by Franciscan priests in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Some were convenient to get to, but others required significant detours while on family vacations (admittedly, my siblings and I complained about some of these).
And then, in 1989, there came a moment in which I became aware that events of my lifetime would one day be studied as history. I was six years old and living in the San Francisco Bay Area when a massive earthquake struck. I had been in my backyard playing baseball with several other children who lived in my neighborhood as we anxiously awaited the start of a World Series game between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. The earthquake was frightening and seemed to last forever. But what was more terrifying was that many of us kids, including me, had parents who worked in San Francisco and it was several hours before we were able to hear from them to know that they were alright. But, in the days that followed, the newspapers had extensive coverage of the quake, including interviews with people who recounted their experiences surviving the event. My father collected several newspapers and clipped relevant articles for his scrapbook. And, while he had kept a scrapbook for years, this time I was aware that the earthquake was not just something that happened to me and my family, but that it was a historic event the consequences of which would be studied by future historians.
Welcome to BYU-Hawaii (Wikimedia Commons)
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Where did you complete your BA? Was history your main area of study in college? Did you complete an MA and PhD? If so, where?
I earned my B.A. in history at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. The university has a very international student body, so it exposed me to a broad range of cultures and studying history in that setting was illuminating—it really forced me away from a view of history that privileged the American perspective. I then earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in history at Louisiana State University, where I specialized in the history of the early American republic and completed my dissertation under the direction of Dr. Andrew Burstein.
LSU’s Memorial Tower (Wikimedia Commons)
What were your research interests in graduate school?
I have long been fascinated with the connections between religion and political culture. Accordingly, in graduate school I focused on the roles of religious language and symbolism played in the politics of the early American republic. Within that topic, I was very interested in examining the different motives for mixing the religious with the secular. Rather than taking all religious expressions in the public square at face value, I wanted to parse out the different strategies and motivations behind invoking the sacred in the quest for secular power, at least to the extent that surviving records allow us to parse out such motives.
What was your largest research project?
In terms of chronological breadth and the number of relevant archival sources to examine, my dissertation-turned-first-book is the largest research project I have undertaken. The result was Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America. In the book I examine the actual role of religion in the American Revolution and the process of state formation that followed by focusing on the political activism of Protestant clergymen. I spent years as a graduate student tracking down archival resources of all types but made it a special quest to locate and read as many of the surviving letters and diaries of clergymen from this time as I could. In fact, when I look in the book’s bibliography at the list of archives that I visited, my mind floods with memories associated with the discoveries I made in each place.
I have since worked on other book projects that have come with their own challenges. But a big part of researching and writing my dissertation was learning how to write a book. And I was fortunate to have faculty mentors who guided me through the entire process. In fact, when I set out to write my second book, a big challenge was undertaking another large-scale research process without the figurative scaffolding that they provided for me as a graduate student. Yet, my success in finishing that second book was due in large part to frequent reminders and applications of the techniques and methods that they had taught me.
What do you think is the toughest part of undertaking a research project?
I think establishing and maintaining the scope of a research project can be challenging. As historians dive deep into the archives, we often find more material than we can ever fit into resulting publications. As a result, it’s easy to give in to the temptation to pack your publication with too much information, such as giving fourteen examples in support of an argument where two or three suffice.
In addition, determining the best chronological scope of a project can be a challenge too. I like big histories that tell big stories over a long period of time. But telling big histories comes with drawbacks. It often forces historians to give up some depth of analysis for greater breadth in coverage. There is no wrong or right choice here; it depends entirely on the goals of the research project. But finding the right chronological scope early in the project is important. For instance, when I first started conducting research for my dissertation on the political activism of clergymen in Revolutionary America, I had plans to take my research all the way to the rise of the Whig Party in the 1830s. But it soon became apparent to me that as interesting as the Whigs’ co-opting of evangelical Christianity was, my primary focus was the role of clergymen and religious language in the American Revolution and the process of state formation that followed. The dissertation—and the book that came from it—would be better and more manageable if I maintained a clear chronological scope tied to the goals of the project.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received about conducting research?
I know it might not be the most exciting topic for some, but the best advice I have ever received pertains to organizing my research materials. When you are looking at thousands of archival documents, it is easy for them to start to blur together and then, when you need a particular detail that you know you read about, it can be difficult to locate it. Having a good system for organizing your research is essential. And this really hit home with me during my first semester of graduate school. One of my professors at LSU, Dr. Suzanne Marchand, had our seminar work on an archival research project as she guided us on some best practices for archival research. She reviewed our archival notes and saved us from errors that could potentially become pitfalls if not corrected. For instance, if we did not clearly indicate capitalization and punctuation when making notes of what a document said, or note where the document is kept, then we would find ourselves later trying feverishly to rediscover that document as we completed an article or book, lest we incorrectly represent that document in our published text. That seems so basic, but I know many historians who, because their time was limited in the archive, have omitted such details from their notes and been forced into this frustrating situation later.
The Church History Library, home to the Joseph Smith Papers, at night.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I think there are many who still think of history as a niche discipline that involves little engagement with and relevance to the general public. I think the exact opposite is true. While we do spend a lot of time in libraries and archives, historians engage the public in a number of ways, including the long-term trickle down of information from the books we write and the classes we teach. And I think that social media has created an important way for historians to engage the public directly and to offer important insights from our research that contextualizes the present. It also seems that recently historians have been more active in the editorial pages of newspapers, which I think can be a really good thing for our societies. Sure, there are some historians who do fit the stereotype of the out-of-touch scholar isolated in the “ivory tower” of academia, but I think those historians are becoming rarer and rarer. Increasingly, I feel like I am part of a community that is doing really good research and finding innovative ways of getting that research to the public.
You’re a historian of Early America. For those interested in the field and wanting to learn more about, what are some must-read books and articles? Who are some early American historians that have inspired you and your work?
Recommending books in early American history is tough because there are so many great books published every year. Once you recommend one it’s almost impossible not to add two or three more to go with it. So, I guess I can start with a few of the books that have inspired my work. Early on in my studies I read several books that really influenced the way I thought about political culture. David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes and Jeffrey Pasley’s The Tyranny of Printers were two particularly influential works for me. And while I may be biased because the authors were my professors, I think Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg is one of the best books on the politics of the early American republic, and it comes through the lens of the political partnership of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In the field of American religious history, I learned a lot by reading Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith and Amanda Porterfield’s Conceived in Doubt.
As for must-read books in the field, the easiest way to answer this might be to name a few relatively recent books that have left a strong impression on me. I really enjoyed Abram C. Van Engen’s City on a Hill and the way that he traces the history of how John Winthrop’s now-famous “city on a hill sermon” has been interpreted and used by Americans over time. Gideon Mailer’s John Witherspoon’s American Revolution is a brilliant mixture of religious and intellectual history that breathes fresh life into the study of Witherspoon and his place in American history. Lastly, David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a thorough and well-crafted biography of the famous abolitionist, and a book that is incredibly timely given the ongoing conflicts over race in the United States.
Are you working on a new book? If so, what’s it on and when might it be available?
My new book is about Joseph Smith’s ill-fated presidential campaign. In 1844, Joseph Smith ran for president as an independent candidate. Although he had no chance of winning, his campaign is significant to the history of the United States because it reveals the discontent of thousands of Americans with the political and social status quo of the country in the nineteenth century. In addition, Smith’s campaign illuminates the political obstacles to universal religious freedom in the United States, that in addition to bigotry religious minorities were working against religious discrimination baked into laws that, on the surface, had nothing to do with religious beliefs or worship. Chief among these was the states’ rights doctrine that prevented adequate federal protection of religious minorities. And so, kind of by accident, Joseph Smith finds himself on the vanguard of those Americans calling for the Bill of Rights to apply to the individual states. It’s a form of popular constitutionalism that does not come out of academic study of constitutional law but rather from the experience of religious minorities in early America.
What I tried to do with this book was take a forgotten campaign that might seem like a mere footnote to the history of the Latter-day Saints and demonstrate how relevant it is to the larger history of the United States—and to issues of inequality in the present. Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.
How would you describe your writing process?
I have come to believe that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all writing process. Every writer needs to find a process that works for him or her. And, for me, a writing process that works for one project may not work for the next. So, my writing process is often in a state of flux. But I found an unusual routine that worked well for me with my new book. With my first book I wrote and revised most of it while I held the T. Harry Williams Dissertation Fellowship, so I had a lot of time to write and revise every day. But with my second book, I was trying to write it while working full-time as a documentary editor at the Joseph Smith Papers. So, I had to try something else.
What I ultimately did was set aside a large block of time to write every Thursday evening for five months. (There was nothing special about Thursday, it was just the most convenient day of the week in my family’s schedule). But this didn’t mean that I didn’t work on my book the other days of the week. I would read, research, outline, and organize my notes so that when 4 PM arrived each Thursday I could write unencumbered. The goal on those evenings was simply words on the page and I would consistently write between 4,000 and 5,000 words. I wrote about eighty percent of the first draft of my new book with this model. Of course, I spent several months revising the draft to make the words I wrote good, but there is something to be said about the mantra, “You can’t edit a blank page.”
You’ve also been a podcaster. Tell us about it and where can we find it? Do you think podcasts can be a great resource for teaching history and if so, why?
As part of my work with the Joseph Smith Papers, I created a six-episode podcast mini-series titled, The First Vision: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast (available on iTunes, Spotify, and pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts). We intended the podcast for a general audience, and Latter-day Saints in particular, who are interested in the major events of Joseph Smith’s life.
Smith claimed that in 1820 he had a vision of deity, an event that became known to Latter-day Saints as “the First Vision,” or “Joseph Smith’s first vision.” Religious history does not seek to prove or disprove claims of spiritual experiences but, rather, to contextualize them. Accordingly, that’s what this podcast seeks to do. We adopted a narrative style (think This American Life or Serial) in which we tell the story of Smith’s experience around excerpts of interviews recorded with experts of American religious history and the history of Joseph Smith. This allows us to consider questions such as how the mass migration of New Englanders to western New York in the early 1800s shaped the religious culture of Smith’s community, or how historical memory influences the way that such events are remembered and commemorated. We even produced an episode on the environmental history of the woods by which Joseph Smith lived in order to better understand what his sensory experience would have been in 1820 (e.g. what his world looked, sounded, and smelled like).
We have been overwhelmed by the response of this podcast (in the four months immediately following its release it was downloaded or streamed more than 1.2 million times). But I am especially encouraged by feedback I get from educators who have used the podcast with their students. Most of these are college professors, but I have heard from some high school teachers, as well. Some have assigned the entire mini-series to their students (the duration of the series is under 3 hours). Others have assigned single episodes. But it seems to me that well-produced history podcasts are a great way of getting content to students and initiating discussions in the classrooms.
Cover of Joseph Priestley’s An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (Wikimedia Commons)
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
I would love to study in depth the life of Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, theologian, and philosopher who ultimately fled to the United States and died in exile there in 1804. In addition to being credited with discovering oxygen in its gaseous state, Priestley made significant contributions to religious and political thought. For instance, his book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity was widely read and influenced the way that many Americans and Europeans thought about the origins and authority of the Bible as a religious text. I hope to undertake such an examination Priestley’s life and influence someday, or at least a study of his years in the United States, though I recognize that it would require significant time and funding because the documents I would need to examine are spread between archives in different countries.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I would LOVE to be playing baseball for the Oakland A’s or the San Diego Padres! But since I gave up hopes of a career in professional baseball back in the fourth grade, I guess that doesn’t really count.
I have often been intrigued by the fields of marketing and public relations. Two of my siblings have made successful careers for themselves in those related fields. I think it’s something that I would enjoy. But there is no doubt that my first choice would always remain history. If I were working on a career track outside of history, I’m sure that I would still be pursuing historical scholarship as a hobby. I’m that passionate about it.
