The Improvement Era

The Improvement Era

Seventy-three years of the church's own magazine — doctrine, fiction, MIA lessons, war reporting and argument. The largest body of material in this library, and the least read.

What it is

The Improvement Era was the official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from November 1897 until June 1970, when it was folded into the Ensign, the New Era and the Friend. For most of the twentieth century it was the church's principal voice to its own membership: not a newsletter, but a general-interest monthly of eighty or a hundred pages, edited by members of the First Presidency.

It began as the organ of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, succeeding The Contributor, and it never entirely stopped being a magazine for young people — lesson outlines, athletics, scouting and Sunday-school material ran alongside doctrinal exposition and general conference reports. That mixture is what makes it valuable now. A church's magazine records what it taught; the Era also records what it worried about, what it found funny, and what it thought its teenagers should be doing on a Friday night.

Almost none of it is readable on the open web. Seventy-three years of a monthly magazine is a great deal of paper, and it has never been indexed in a form anyone can search. That is the single reason it sits at the front of this library.

What we hold

The complete run. 874 issues from November 1897 to June 1970, split into more than 16,000 separately addressable items — articles, editorials, departments, poems, lesson outlines and conference material — with over 1,600 named contributors.

What is actually in it

The subject mix is unlike anything else in the library. Missionary work and the Book of Mormon lead, as they would in any church publication — but so do education, marriage, and the Mutual Improvement Association itself, and behind those sits a great deal of ordinary Utah life.

The decade shape is worth noticing on its own. The Era is at its largest in the 1930s and 1940s, the years of the Depression, the founding of the church welfare programme and the Second World War. A magazine gets fat when there is a great deal to say.

Why it is hard to use, and what that costs

Three things make the Era resistant to ordinary research. It is enormous. Its departments changed names repeatedly across seven decades, so the same recurring feature appears under three or four titles. And its vocabulary is period vocabulary: the welfare programme was the Church Security Program until 1938, and an article about it may never use the word a reader would search for today.

That last problem is the reason this corpus indexes subject tags alongside the full text. A search for “church welfare” has to be able to reach a 1936 article that says “relief” fifty-six times and “welfare” twice.

How to read it

• Date everything. Seventy years is three or four distinct editorial regimes and at least two changes in how the church talked about itself. An Era article is evidence of its moment, not of a settled position.
• Mind the genre. The magazine ran fiction, poetry and youth lesson material next to First Presidency messages. A short story is not a doctrinal statement, and the layout does not always make the difference obvious.
• Expect the vocabulary to have moved. Search the idea, not only the modern word for it.