Experiences of Criminal Justice

When Danish immigrant and Latter-day Saint convert Andrew Jenson left his homeland as a teenager for the American West in 1866, he envisioned a better life in a land of seemingly endless economic and spiritual possibilities. Instead, the Latter-day Saint kingdom in the West, then squarely outside accepted notions of American respectability, brought new challenges. Trapped in a cycle of intermittent wage work, Jenson reimagined himself as a journalist and advocate for Latter-day Saint Scandinavians in Utah Territory. He quickly evolved into a self-made historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For the next fifty years until his death in 1941, Jenson documented the church’s transition away from its insular nineteenth-century past toward a more modern future. This book chronicles the life and career of historian Andrew Jenson, a prolific writer and long-time employee of the Historian’s Office, the church’s main archive. Jenson reformed institutional record keeping, expanded the church’s primitive archive, and traveled over one million miles to gather Latter-day Saint history around the globe. This book charts a different course for the field of Latter-day Saint biography by telling the story of a life outside the church’s hierarchy. Additionally, this book uses Jenson’s life to narrate a larger history of the Historian’s Office while offering a fresh perspective on a remarkable era of global growth and change for the church.