Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. I'm Joseph Stewart. In the earliest days of the restoration,

the Lord commanded that there shall be a record kept among you. Latter-day Saints have taken that

commandment to heart. One of the ways that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have obeyed

that commandment is through the research and publication of the Joseph Smith Papers Project,

a documentary history project that will eventually comprise

at least 27 volumes of documents created by or with direct authorization from Joseph Smith.

On today's episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast, we discussed the 12th volume of the

documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, which covers March to July 1843.

We are fortunate to be able to learn from Robin Scott Jensen, David Grua, and Jessica Nelson,

three of the editors who worked on the volume.

As always, the best way to show that you love the show is to recommend it to friends, family members, and on social media.

Please be sure to follow the Maxwell Institute on

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and sign up for our newsletter for more information on events,

scholarship, and insights from the scholars at the Institute. Robin, David, Jessica, thanks for joining us

today. Thanks for having us. It's good to be here. Yeah, thanks. It is our pleasure to have you all here.

I was fascinated when I was looking through documents volume 12 of the Joseph Smith papers,

and I realized it may be helpful to begin sort of big picture with this.

What is the purpose of the Joseph Smith papers?

What is documentary editing?

And how did the project begin?

Yeah, thank you. It's a good question because sometimes when new volumes are released,

people aren't quite sure how to tackle it. This is volume 12 of the document series, and there's even more volumes than that.

...