I agree with you. BTW, I dropped the passage for reasons of length, but I found that B.H. Roberts, CHC 5:79-80, responded to the insularity claims, specifically addressing Bancroft.

And even if I granted for the sake of discussion that such was BY’s intent, we’d have to account for the utter failure of BY to do anything — a single thing — to curb the importation of massive amounts of reading material in the form of books, newspapers, and magazines, at any time. (He did rail against dime novels and romances and lying journalism, but he didn’t lift a finger to interfere with its importation.)

For me, the reality of the imports, with BY’s full support and encouragement, and to a great degree his financing (and we’re not even beginning to talk about his constant efforts to decrease isolation through improved mail and freighting and encouragement for railroads), so far outweighs the ideological theories advanced for isolation and insularity that I can’t take them seriously. At all.

I’ve come across a few relevant sources:

Bigler’s Forgotten Kingdom:

Aimed to reform the representation of the English language, not the language itself, the new phonetic system offered a number of advantages. First, it demonstrated cultural exclusivism, an important consideration. It also kept secrets from curious non-Mormons, controlled what children would be allowed to read, and in a largely unlettered society that included non-English speaking converts, eliminated the awkward problem of phonetic spelling. For such reasons, for nearly two decades Brigham Young pushed the new alphabet on reluctant followers.

Bancroft’s History of Utah, 712:

At a meeting of the board of regents, held in October 1853, Parley P. Pratt, Heber C. Kimball, and George D. Watt were appointed a committee to prepare a small school-book in characters founded on some new system of orthography, whereby the spelling and pronunciation of the English language might be made uniform and easily acquired. A further object was exclusiveness, a separate people wishing to have a separate language, and perhaps in time an independent literature.

P. Lynott’s dissertation on Susa Young Gates quotes from an 1868 Deseret News article stating that a primary reason for the DA was “the weeding out of objectionable literature.” She states that church leaders believed that the DA would help unify a diverse set of colonists, including thousands of non-English speaking converts, and provide educational benefits. Finally, she argues that Mormons were isolated from the rest of society and deliberately chose to be isolated. Thus, a separate language would assist in ensuring their insularity.

As always, your post is wonderful and a pleasure to read. I too am looking forward to part 3.

You, sir, have no place attending polite functions, and are not welcome to comment on Keepa.

Um, slightly more sex and violence than the OT, IIRC. Really.

It’s just veiled in Jacobean English in the KJV, so maybe you missed it.

And that was a good scene. I’ll have to suggest it to some of my estate planning clients.

One of my favorite parts in Cryptonomicon is the scene where the family of academics and mathematicians are dividing up the grandfather’s estate by stamping out a huge x/y axis in the snow of the yard, and then placing items in relation to their perceived emotional vs financial value.

Um, slightly more sex and violence than the OT, IIRC. Really.