On the Potter's Wheel: The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball

On the Potter's Wheel
The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball
STANLEY B. KIMBALL, EDITOR
Significant Mormon Diaries Series No. 2
Hardback. 262 Pages. / 0-941214-60-5 / $60.00

Although unlearned and barely literate, Heber Chase Kimball demonstrated a keen sense of history by faithfully recording his impressions of people and developments of early Mormonism. His personal diaries, lacking in punctuation and erratic in orthography, are often the best and sometimes the only contemporary accounts of the events they chronicle. Kimball was one of the first missionaries to England and was one of the first Mormon polygamists.

His four diaries from 1837 to 1847 and his memorandum book from 1852 through 1864 contain his immediate, on-the-spot observations without the subsequent editing and embellishment of his later reminiscenses, some of which were erroneously published as "journals." Those diary entries which Kimball did not write or dictate are not included in this publication. What is presented in toto, with annotation, are Kimball's own, first-hand jottings, which reveal the man who wrote them far better than any publication based on them.

Stanley B. Kimball, professor of history at Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville), is the editor of On the Potter's Wheel: The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball and the author of Czech Nationalism, Discovering Mormon Trails, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer, Historic Sites and Markers Along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails, and several other books and many articles in the areas of Mormon and East European history. Stan passed away in 2003.