Article Title

The Joseph Smith Papers Project

Authors

Ronald K. Esplin

Keywords

Joseph Smith, texts, materials, history

Abstract

The Joseph Smith Papers Project seeks to do for Joseph Smith what has been done (and is being done) for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other important early Americans: Make their papers easily accessible and more intelligible by publishing them in a carefully prepared, comprehensive scholarly edition. Historians rely on documents to gain insight into the facts, relationships, and other realities of the past, the raw materials from which they construct their narratives and interpretations. The task of scholars functioning as documentary editors is to help readers and other scholars understand the documents without getting too much in the way themselves, leaving others to construct their own narratives from these (and other) documentary resources.

Recommended Citation

Esplin, Ronald K. (2008) "The Joseph Smith Papers Project," Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship: Vol. 28: No. 3, Article 5.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/insights/vol28/iss3/5