John Clark's reflection from Upstate New York

This one Google books contains John A. Clark's Gleanings by the Way, published in Philadelphia in 1842, but one has to read it online. However, Gutenberg has a copy, and BYU offers a PDF.

The Rev. John A. Clark was the rector of St. Andrews church in Philadelphia, but had traveled in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, including the Susquehanna valley.
Clark covers the Golden Bible story starting with Chapter 22, p.216 to the end of the book.
Clark is also awesome because he contains notes about Mormon banking in Chapter 31.

Maximillian von Wied as fellow traveller

Thanks to the Google book search features, I was able to procure a travel description of the interior US of A for the important years of 1832-1834, when Prinz Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied crossed through the continent and wrote a 500+ page travel description description. This should help flesh out some of the travel descriptions that I have gathered so far form the primary documents.

I was actually looking for Kennedy's "Early Days of Mormonism" (1888) and Linn's "The Story of the Mormons" (1902), both available at the Salomon Spalding info website, but neither of these are scanned in Google books.

Toward the Spalding Enigma

Spent some time this morning looking into the clues of the Spalding Enigma, when I finally got into that section of the Howe story -- who first published the materials on Spalding and Rigdon.

The Wikipedia article seems oddly biased toward the apologetic LDS position.

Broadhurst's website has a reconstruction that lacks the footnotes (sigh) but makes sense as a narrative, if the omissions from the official LDS history that they record are indeed correct. Specifically, the claim is that Smith and Cowdery met before 1827 (in 1822) and that Rigdon knew Spalding and his work and was instrumental in the publication of the Book of Mormon, faking a conversion experience when Pratt and Cowdery came to missionize.

A separate group of guys that are friends of Broadhurst and did a lot of the legwork of the Spalding-Rigdon theory wrote a book about the enigma in 2005; the have a website for their efforts.

E.D. Howe's 1834 Mormonism Unveiled on the Web

Like so many other documents having to do with early Mormonism, Dale R. Broadhurst's set of webpages at SalomonSpaulding.com has a scanned copy of Eber Dudley Howe's 1834 book Mormonism Unveiled.

Unfortunately, the Broadhurst scan as of December 2013 is incomplete; I communicated with Dale, but I don't know if I found everything and when he will have time to fix it. We communicated and agreed that more proofing is necessary, but we need to see when we two get around to that.

At any rate:

• The Google books version is here. 
• The Internet archive's version of the Google scan is here.
• The Internet archive's version sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Library System is here.

Analogy in Archaeology

The book

Röder, Brigitte, Hummel, Juliane, Kunz, Brigitte: Göttinnendämmerung, 1996 (München : Droemer Knaur), ISBN: 3-426-26887-6

suggests on p.168 that p.16 in Ian Hodder's 1982 book

Ian Hodder, The present past: An introduction to anthropology for archaeologists, London 1982. 

is helpful in thinking about archaeological analogy.

Analogien sind ganz allgemein eine Form des Informationstransfers von einem Objekt zum anderen, wobei verbindende Vergleichbarkeiten vorhanden sein müssen (Hodder 1982, 16). [p.168]

Analogies are generally speaking a form of information transfer from one object to another, where comparable features are present (Hodder 1982, 16). [p.168] 

Juliane Hummel, who contributed this chapter, continues

Jede analoge Schlußfolgerung ist an die sozialen und historischen Umstände der interpretierenden Person gebunden und spielt sich grundsätzlich vor dem Hintergrund des jeweiligen persönlichen Wissens und der individuellen Überlegungen über die Welt und die Menschen ab, .... [p.168]

Every analogical conclusion is tied to the social and historical circumstances of the interpreting person and essentially plays out in front of the backdrop of personal knowledge and individual musing about the world and humanity, .... [p.168]  

though she points out that the interpreting persons need not be aware of these limitations and cites Sir Arthur Evans of Krete fame as a good example.

All of this is fundamentally hermeneutic in the iterative deepening circle sense of the word.

Es kann nur das gefunden werden, was dem Interpreten oder der Interpretin bekannt ist. [p.168]

As interpreters, we can only find what we are familiar with. [p.168]

As a minor criticism, I would disagree with that conclusion in the limit case, as its truth would eliminate the possibility of ever learning about any new objects. We are quite capable of realizing that we have never seen anything like it and that a new term is in order.

But I am with Brigitte Röder when she observes that any act of identification is an act of interpretation already.

Schon allein die Feststellung, daß es sich bei ... [einem] ... Bronzeobjekt um ein Schwert handelt, ist eine Analogie auf dem Hintergrund heutigen Wissens. Letztendlich kann nämlich nicht mit endgültiger Sicherheit ge- [p.168] sagt werden, ob ein solcher Gegenstand, nur weil er eine Form aufweist, die uns als "Schwert" vertraut ist, wirklich als Waffe benutzt wurde (Sangmeister 1967, 202). Vielleicht diente er ja als Grabstock oder als Webschwert? [p.168f]

Even the mere identification of some bronze object as a sword is an analogy grounded in present day knowledge. In the limit no one can say definitively [p.168] whether such an object, just because it has a shape that is familiar to us as a "sword", was truly used as a weapon (Sangmeister 1967, 202). Maybe it was used to dig or during weaving? [p.168f]

Thus, analogies never amount to proofs, just as providers of plausibility.

Analogien ... sind der einzige Weg, über einen archäologischen Befund und über Funktion von Gerätschaften Hypothesen zu bilden und den Blick auf Aspekte und Strukturen zu lenken, die die Quellen von sich aus nicht verraten. [p.169]

Analogies ... are the only way to form hypotheses about an archaeological finding and about the function of tools and to put into view aspects and structures that the sources do not reveal by themselves. [p.169] 

dissertations for Early Mormonism

From a footnote in

Compton, Todd M.; Gentry, Leland Homer (2012-01-26). Fire and Sword: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri, 1836-39 (ebook Part 1) (Kindle Locations 218-227). Greg Kofford Books. Kindle Edition. 

comes the suggestion of some places to look, including

Larry C. Porter, “A Study of the Origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the States of New York and Pennsylvania, 1816–1831” (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1971); Max H. Parkin, “A History of the Latter-day Saints in Clay County, Missouri, from 1833 to 1837”; and Milton V. Backman Jr., The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio, 1830–1838. Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith. Several of the women I researched had significant Missouri experiences: Emily and Eliza Partridge, daughters of Bishop Edward Partridge; Agnes Coolbrith Smith, wife of Don Carlos Smith; Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner; Eliza R. Snow; Lucy Walker; and Martha McBride Knight, wife of Bishop Vinson Knight. Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri; Alexander L. Baugh, A Call to Arms: The 1838 Defense of Northern Missouri.