The late 1800s have been noted as a major transitional period for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the beleaguered pioneers first arrived in Utah they were isolated from the influence and expectations of the United States. During that time, leaders of the Church became influential in every aspect of life in Utah. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the period of isolation had come to an end. Nationally, the social norms had changed and religion was expected to stay in the churches and out of politics. Church leaders were faced with serious questions regarding what policies and practices could be altered without betraying doctrines and principles of the gospel. Education was at the forefront of this tension in Utah. Members of the Church tried to hold on to an integrated approach to education that incorporated both the spiritual and the secular. Others, however, adamantly opposed such an approach in public schools. In 1892, the First Presidency announced a new educational institution that would become the administrative head of all Church schools: The University of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Willard Young became the President and James Talmage was placed over the science department. Talmage traveled to Europe to purchase the best scientific equipment. With the scientific apparatus and a new building the leaders of the Church hoped to persuade the youth of the Church to obtain higher education at home rather than traveling east to attend secularized universities. The Church's first private university seemed destined to become a major influence in Utah education. However, after one successful semester, President Woodruff closed the school and donated over sixty thousand dollars to the University of Utah. The following research explores the history of the Church University and the circumstances surrounding its closure. The paper shows how a combination of the financial panic of 1893, the effort to obtain statehood, and a rare opportunity to quietly gain influence at the University of Utah factored into the decision to close the Church's first private university.

This thesis answers the question of how a vision recorded in Joseph Smith's journal found its home in the Doctrine and Covenants and become recognized as canonized scripture. The April 3, 1836, journal entry became known as Section 110. Section 110 serves as a foundation for the current practices and doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, involving temple building and temple ordinances. Thus it is important to understand the history of this Section from journal entry to canonization because it is an example of recovering revelation. This thesis also explores contributing factors that could have led to the rediscovery of the 1836 vision. While Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were in the Kirtland Temple with veils drawn around them at the Melchizedek Priesthood pulpits on April 3, 1836, they both saw Jesus Christ, Moses, Elias, and Elijah. Jesus Christ accepted the newly built temple and Moses, Elias, and Elijah committed keys to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. The vision was recorded, but as of yet, there is no evidence that the vision was publicly taught by Joseph Smith nor by Oliver Cowdery. This thesis follows the pattern established by Section 110 and the reclamation of the revelation and looks at how this section paved the way for other revelations and visions to move from handwritten pages to doctrinal levels of canonization, such as Sections 137 and 138. Joseph Smith had the vision recorded in his journal by Warren Cowdery, who served as a scribe to him. Joseph Smith also had the journal entry written in the Manuscript History of the Church. Although Joseph Smith did not publically declare that the 1836 vision had occurred to him and Oliver Cowdery, he still taught about the visitors in the vision and of their importance. After Joseph Smith's death, the leaders of the Church had his history printed in Church owned newspapers. The first time the vision was published in print was on November 6, 1852, in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Deseret News. Outside influences of the late 1850s through the 1860s put pressure on the Church. Some of these potentially destructive influences were the Utah War, Civil War, transcontinental railroad, Spiritualism movement, and the lack of understanding of the foundational doctrines of the Church by the rising generation that had been a part of the Church from its beginnings with Joseph Smith as its Prophet. This thesis explores these potentially destructive forces on the Church and its doctrine, and looks at how the leadership of the Church responded to them and how their response influenced the canonization of the 1836 vision. Under the direction of Brigham Young, Orson Pratt oversaw the publication of the new 1876 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. This new edition contained twenty-six new sections, including Section 110. After the death of Brigham Young in 1877, John Taylor sat at the head of the Church as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. While Orson Pratt was in England, preparing to print a new edition of the Book of Mormon on electrotype plates, he asked John Taylor about printing the Doctrine and Covenants with the electrotype plates as well. John Taylor agreed on condition that Orson Pratt add cross references and explanatory notes, as he had done with the Book of Mormon. Using the 1876 edition, Orson Pratt made the requested additions and the new edition of the Doctrine and Covenants was printed in 1880 and canonized on October 10, 1880, in a General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where all present voted unanimously to accept the 1880 edition as canonized scripture.

Historically Black colleges and universities served as primary sites of modernist artmaking. In 1920, however, no HBCU offered an art major or employed full-time fine arts faculty. This dissertation examines that swift transformation, demonstrating it not as a simple evolution, but rather as a contested site of Black thought and protest. I show this not through an institutional history or "timeline" of Black college art departments, but rather in a sustained attention towards Black colleges as nodes within a larger network of publics constituting Black modernism as sites for subjectivity. In doing so, this dissertation examines the conjuncture between two coincident forms: that of modernist art and of the same era's radical modes of racial exclusion. I ask what is at stake in art as lived experience, at a moment in which modernist aesthetics made claims as a means of producing novel ways of inhabiting being human while simultaneous modes of racial formation devalued Blackness within that conceptual category as life. Through this, I track aesthetic production as a relation and set of experiences occurring through specific sites and publics as an asymmetric arena for contestation, with an emphasis on historically Black colleges and universities. My first chapter, "Organize, Strike, Paint: Making Modern Art at Historically Black Colleges," charts that shift in a set of breaks in art-making at HBCUs, arguing for a student-driven movement away from industrial education towards a modernist visual arts, one embedded within a larger constellation of sites. My second chapter, "Aaron Douglas and a Liberatory History of the Senses," looks closely at Fisk University through the work of painter Aaron Douglas in a set of site-specific murals he made which visualize a long narrative of Black history, art, and labor. I argue that Douglas interrogated in those paintings central questions of visual modernism, placing the radical exclusion of Black subjects in slavery and its afterlives in the Jim Crow era as central to an understanding of modern vision and subjectivity. Through such works, HBCUs stand as necessary sites for theorizing a history of vision and its relation to the "human," as a rejoinder to histories of visual modernism that do not meaningfully account for racialization. In my final chapter, "Black Study in the White Cube: Racialized Subjectivities and the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1935," I demonstrate the circulation and exclusions that structured Black audiences and art viewing. I do so through an examination of the Museum of Modern Art’s African Negro Art exhibition, which Black artists engaged with as visitors at MoMA, through mediated forms in print and photography, as well as in circulating satellite shows presented at HBCUs. In doing so, I attend to both the modes of viewership at the museum proper as well as the ways it interacted within a broader network of Black publics. Similarly, I examine the specific content of that MoMA exhibit in its primitivist imagination of an African past, one which might be used as a ground for "modern" white subjects. I track how Black artists confronted that continued legacy of anti-Blackness and addressed the immense dislocations inherent in it. Throughout, I provided sustained attention to artists including Hale Woodruff, Loïs Mailou Jones, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Amaza Lee Meredith, William H. Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett.

My thesis deals with dye plants and possibilities of their use. The first part contains classification of dye plants and history of their use. In the next part, there is a summary of dye plants and colors we can get from them. Methodology of coloring is also introduced. At the end, there are botanic parameters, environment needs and cultivation methods of eight selected dye plants. The thesis include database of dye plants in electronic form.