Explore New Content on Our Website

We recently added new content to www.josephsmithpapers.org and encourage you to explore it:

• About 100 documents from April and May 1843, including discourses, letters, and land deeds. Highlights include
  • Discourse, 8 April 1843, as Reported by William Clayton, in which Joseph Smith preached on the Book of Revelation and freedom of belief.
  • Letter from John E. Page, 2 May 1843, requesting permission to start a church printing press in Pittsburgh.
  • Bond from Brigham Young and John M. Bernhisel, 30 May 1843, related to building the temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, and the Nauvoo House.
  • Deed to Lucien Woodworth and Others, 31 May 1843, one of many land transactions in this period and significant because the transaction included three women.
• Additional documents from 1835, 1836, and 1837 to supplement the newly released Documents, Volume 5, including land transactions in Kirtland, Ohio, and documents from the Kirtland Safety Society.
• Rough minutes for city council meetings held in 1842 and 1843.
• Footnotes for volume E-1 of the Manuscript History of the Church pointing readers to the original sources used to compile this history.
• A topic article helping users understand Joseph Smith’s relationship to the Nauvoo Female Relief Society.
• New and updated reference material, including thirty-six new biographical entries, three new geographical entries, and almost 900 new entries on the calendar of documents for the period from October 1835 to January 1838.

Additionally, several updates have been made to the website:

• In the Manuscript History of the Church, page breaks are being added that correspond to the page numbers in B. H. Roberts’s six-volume publication in the early twentieth century, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See the Introduction to History, 1838–1856 (Manuscript History of the Church) for more information.
• In document transcripts, the Document Information section at the foot of each page has been updated to include two new fields. “Print Volume Location” gives the volume and page number where the current document can be found in the Joseph Smith Papers letterpress edition (where applicable), and “Handwriting on This Page” identifies the scribe or scribes who wrote the current page.