By Camille Tanner
The life of the Prophet Joseph Smith will be featured in this month”s BYU Studies Journal. Historians and editors have come together to create a new color-coded chronology to reflect the many facets of the prophet”s life. Now readers can see the activities and whereabouts of the prophet on a week-to-week basis.
Information is broken into seven categories: personal life, vision and revelations, writings, ecclesiastical duties, legal events, travels and political events.
“The color-coded chronology will help readers better place the events of Joseph”s life in order to see connections and interrelationships,” said Roger Terry, senior associate editor.
Information for the chronology was taken from The History of the Church, Personal Writings of Joseph Smith and other research compiled over the years.
Along with events from the prophet”s life, the chronology includes notes about what was occurring in the world, such as the opening of the Eerie Canal and the premier of Beethoven”s Symphony #9.
“We are putting the prophet into his historical context,” said Heather Seferovich, the senior executive editor at BYU Studies. “So readers get a feel for what his world and culture was like.”
According to Seferovich, most of the church history stories people hear occur in a vacuum.
“By including all the different facets of the prophet”s life and what was going on around him you get a sense of the depth, the richness and the texture of his life,” Seferovich said.
A full-color sample is available online at byustudies.byu.edu/dailypdfs/chronologysample.pdf.
The Joseph Smith chronology will be sold in the BYU Bookstore in March. A one-year subscription to the BYU Studies journal is $10.
