Historians create visionary project

About 30 years after he began his work on Joseph Smith's papers, Dean C. Jessee was asked to go home and rethink the project.

   The request, however, was far from critical.

   Instead, Jessee's colleagues were trying to give his project the attention and resources they felt it deserved. Jessee delivered on his assignment, and today the Joseph Smith Papers is in a place its founder never could have imagined.

   "It was a good thing that we did, because it wouldn't have been nearly what it is now if it hadn't been (for) that change," Jessee said.

   What was once a one-man operation in the old Church Historian's Office has evolved into a large-scale effort that Elder Marlin K. Jensen, current historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called "the single most significant historical project of our generation." In the 1960s, Jessee pioneered the work of collecting, transcribing and publishing documents created by the LDS Church's founder. Now retired but still active in the work, he is witness to an ambitious project with the talent and resources to occupy an enviable position in the scholarly world.

   "It is marvelous to say the least," Jessee said. "I can't flower up the language enough.... I had never conceived it would be the way that it is now."

  THE JOSEPH SMITH PAPERS is a documentary editing project that over the next 20 years will publish 30 volumes of documents produced by the Prophet and his scribes or owned by his office, including journal entries, recorded revelations and discourses, correspondence, meeting minutes, and business and legal records. Approximately 2,000 documents will be included, along with annotations and visual aids. Each volume will be 500 to 700 pages long.

   But in a sense, the whole project began with a series of articles written by Jessee.

   After obtaining a position with the church archives in 1964, Jessee, who studied church history at Brigham Young University, was asked by Truman G. Madsen to contribute to the scholarly publication BYU Studies by writing about Joseph Smith and early Mormon history. The assignment "reinforced in (me) a desire to understand and publish the documentary record of Joseph Smith," Jessee writes in an article called "Joseph Smith and His Papers: An Editorial View."

   After eight years of working with manuscripts in the church archives, Jessee was approached by newly appointed Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington about joining the newly created history division.