Martin Harris played a pivotal role in the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith Jr. in 1830. A veteran of the War of 1812 who had served in the New York militia, Harris settled in Palmyra, New York, where he became a prosperous landowner. He supported Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon by serving as his scribe and later became one of the Three Witnesses, testifying—along with Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer—that an angel showed them the golden plates and that God’s voice declared the translation true. In 1830, Harris mortgaged and sold 151 acres of his farm to finance the book’s printing, a sacrifice that underscored his commitment despite personal cost.
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/martin-harriss-unwavering-deathbed
The American press during the 1790s played a role analogous to that of today’s electronic media, which, like today, was used as a vehicle to attack the principles and policies of the opposing political parties of the period. Since the dawn of a literate public actively engaged in government, politicians have both supported and cursed the effects of the press on the political process. The rapidly growing media of the late eighteenth century was seen as a necessary evil that could serve or destroy the evolution of the new federal government.
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-press-as-a-weapon-how-1790s-newspapers
The Old Testament’s first mention of polygamy appears not among the righteous, but in the violent lineage of Cain, through his descendant Lamech, who “took unto him two wives,” Adah and Zillah (Genesis 4:19). In the same brief passage, Lamech boasts to those wives of having slain two men—one “to my wounding,” and a young man “to my hurt”—while daring any avenger to face a vengeance “seventy and sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24). The canonical account leaves the circumstances of these killings ambiguous: accident, self-defense, or cold-blooded murder? Scripture alone offers no clarity. Yet when apocryphal witnesses are consulted, the portrait darkens dramatically, revealing Lamech not as a flawed but sympathetic figure, but as the Bible’s inaugural polygamist whose life bears only the rotten fruit of murder, secret oaths with Satan, and divine curse—fruit that exposes plural marriage’s origin as profoundly corrupt from its very root.
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