In June we announced that the print edition of the Joseph Smith Papers Project has been completed with the publication of our final volume, Documents, Volume 15. Now that much of the work of the Joseph Smith Papers Project is completed, you may be wondering what all our historians and editors are going to do. Fortunately, we’ve been planning for this transition for a long time.
A small team will continue working on the project website, josephsmithpapers.org, until at least the end of 2025. We are still publishing new materials online in the Legal Records, Financial Records, and Administrative Records series. In the next couple of years, we will also add the contents of our last few Documents volumes to the website as well as reference resources and various additional documents, including any other documents from Joseph Smith that surface. This newsletter will continue to provide updates on what we’re up to.
You may also be familiar with the Church Historian’s Press, announced in 2008 as an official imprint of the Church History Department. Under that imprint, we’ll continue publishing high-quality works of Latter-day Saint history for scholars and for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
For example, a team of historians and editors in the Church History Department is currently working on an annotated selection of the discourses of Eliza R. Snow, second general president of the Relief Society. Another team is transcribing and annotating the three Nauvoo journals of William Clayton, a scribe and close friend of Joseph Smith. Work also continues on the journal of apostle George F. Richards. This is just a sampling of the publications you’ll see from the Church Historian’s Press in the years ahead.
To keep up with all the developments on these projects, we encourage you to subscribe to the Church Historian’s Press newsletter, if you haven’t yet. This newsletter will be sent about once a month.