Memories Of Mt Zion

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands. Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning. This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.

This book MEMORIES OF MOUNTAIN HOME SCHOOL is a personal journey by a former student, a labor of love. Part 1 traces the evolution of the school from a one-room, one-teacher school teaching grades one through eight to become a rural consolidated school teaching a fully accredited high school curriculum, to its sad decline and closure brought about by dramatic socio-economic changes that took place following WWII. The author draws from original sources to capture the role of the school in the lives of early settlers prior to Oklahoma statehood and during the years of rapid settlement and political turmoil following Oklahoma statehood through WWI. It describes dedicated work to continue upgrading the school during the economically static years of the 1920s and the years of brutal economic decline during the Great Depression, to form a fully accredited rural high school. After becoming fully accredited in 1941 Mountain Home School enjoyed its years of greatest achievements during the 1940s. Then decline brought about by rapidly declining population set in in the early 1950s leading to closure of the school in 1958. Part 2 is the personal memories contributed by 56 former Mountain Home School students. Their span the period from the early 1930s to the closure of the school in 1958. These wonderful personal memories convey the spirit and achievements of the school and the spirit and shared values of those who learned there.