Ralph Waldo Emerson on why travel is a bad idea: "Traveling is a fool's paradise," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had a lot to say about the follies of travel in his essay Self-Reliance while Melville was lost in the South Seas... The soul is no

Abraham Lincoln: Thunder over Heaven Ta Chuang - the superior man does not tread upon paths that do not accord with established order. It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and

Joseph Smith Feng – thunder over the fire - the preacher and prophet... It is not given to every mortal to bring about a time of outstanding greatness and abundance. Only a born ruler of men is able to do it, because his will is directed to what is great. Such

Herman Melville - Lu the Wanderer Conventional explanations of Melville focus on his restless spirit. That's the gist of a well known diagnosis by "friend" Nathaniel Hawthorne: It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in

* 1805 Birth of Joseph Smith * 1809 Birth of Abraham Lincoln * 1814 The Golden Pot. A Modern Fairytale by E.T.A. Hoffmann published * 1819 Birth of Herman Melville * 1820 Joseph Smith’s first vision; further visions through the 1820s * 1823 Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews published, reflecting widely

Mormonism - the religion of the Latter Day Saints - truly does have a claim to being the Great American Religion. Its success in the 1830s and 1840s means, after all, that imported Christianity was deemed insufficient. For Melville it was the Dutch Calvinism of his mother and the Unitarianism

In 1840, Nauvoo, Illinois, was on its way to becoming the 10th largest city in the U.S. as converts flooded in from Old and New England.  Some estimates are that there were 20,000 people there by 1844, making Nauvoo the largest city in Illinois. After the disastrous events

Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was published on April Fools' Day in 1857 and unless you are fascinated by Melville, it's utterly unreadable. But it's my favorite. The setting is the Fidèle, a Mississippi steamboat, in an era when a boat or railroad

The meaning of Urim and Thummim in ancient Israelite mythology and LDS scripture is unclear, but that hasn't prevented volumes of learned speculation. Most explanations accept that the stones were used for divination. For example, they were put into a pouch and then pulled out to determine guilt