Joseph Smith Wasn’t Who Everyone Thinks He Was


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I'll never forget learning about Joseph Smith in my 11th-grade American History class. As a student — and especially as a teenager — it's easy to take everything your textbook says as gospel. After all, they're supposed to be impartial, well-researched, and completely factual, right? Bad news: they're supposed to be, but... Well, sometimes they're not. That day in class became the first time in my life I realized that you need to question what you read — and that even history (or more appropriately, how we perceive history) can get things wrong. How the World Views Joseph Smith The textbook presented Joseph Smith as a treasure-hunting conman from a line of poor, scheming (though usually unsuccessful) ancestors. There wasn't any acknowledgement of the young boy with a thoughtful question or his hardworking parents who fell victim to hard times — instead, the book relied on gossip about who Joseph was without much real research, glossing over any goodness he (or the Church he helped to restore) possessed. Today, that sentiment seems to be popular...

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Yup.  My son had to read through that same type of "history" book when we enrolled him in an online curriculum.  I wrote about that some time ago.  It was a good thing he asked us about it.  We told him the actual facts.

We dropped out after that semester.

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