In January 1833, Joseph Smith wrote to W. W. Phelps,
who was then the editor of the Evening in the Morning Star,
asking him to make that newspaper more interesting by setting
forth the rise, progress, and faith of the Church.
Three months later, Phelps responded with
a short article detailing the growth of
the Church since its founding.
Although Phelps’s article was the first assigned history of
the Church to appear in print,
Joseph Smith assigned at least 10 different individuals to write
or help to write a history of the Church. Volume
1 of the Histories series includes histories personally
written by Joseph Smith or produced under his close
supervision. Volume 2 presents
for other histories assigned by Joseph Smith
but not directly supervised by him.
The earliest assignment to write
a history was to John Whitmer when he was called his Church
Historian in 1831. Eventually,
Whitmer produced a 96-page handwritten history of
the Church. The first part of his manuscript ends with a plea
for forgiveness of his faults.
But Whitmer later came back
and crossed out those last few lines of contrition.
He then wrote three more chapters that reflected his bitterness
and disillusionment with the Church.
John Corrill was called
as Church historian after John Whitmer’s excommunication.
Corrill published his history independently in 1839,
and Joseph Smith asked Edward Partridge to compile
a list of grievances related to the Mormon War in Missouri.
Partridge responded with a series of articles published in
the Times and Seasons.
All four histories in this volume were written in response to
assignments by Joseph Smith,
but they're really different from one another.
Two of the histories in the volume,
those by Phelps and Partridge, are sympathetic portrayals of
the Saints. The other two, by Whitmer and Corrill,
were written by men who had become disaffected and left
the Church. But taken together,
these four histories enrich our understanding of the history of
the Church.