Huh? Why wouldn't it still be online? It's unclear what his concerns are, but things get more interesting down in the comments. Rick Anderson, apparently from the BYU Libraries, leaves the following note:There are some excellent scholarly resources on the question — including, for example, Gregory L. Smith’s review “George Smith’s Nauvoo Polygamy,” in the now defunct FARMS Review 20/2 (2008): 37-123 (miraculously still available online, despite the odds,
And here is Dr. Peterson's response:Rick Anderson wrote:There's no miracle involved in the preservation of the _FARMS Review_ -- just lots of good (and ongoing) work by my colleagues in the BYU Library, who have archived the full run from 1989 to 2011 at https://scholarsarchive.byu.... This archive one of the many things that make me proud to work in that library.
This is quite a spectacular claim. A "literal attempt to destroy the FARMS Review"? Who was (allegedly) attempting to do this? Gerald Bradford? And *why*? And *how*? I mean, we are talking about quite a niche publication with articles that, at best, are of substandard quality. Who would want to bother one way or the other? And plus, these things were all *digital.* Are we actually meant to believe that DCP, Midgley, Parker, Roper, and the rest of "The Crew" hadn't saved like a million copies of these?I'm deeply grateful for the Library's preservation of those materials.
I was using the word miraculously with some irony. There was a literal attempt to destroy the FARMS Review and other publications of the pre-2012 Maxwell Institute. Fortunately, it did not entirely succeed.
I could see how the Powers That Be might have had a "Meh" attitude towards these Mopologetic publications, and might have felt unmotivated to keep the digital archive up to date, but to "literally destroy" them? This sounds like full-blown, cockamamie nonsense--one of the most ridiculous assertions that Dr. Peterson has ever made, and that's really saying something. Without details to substantiate his claim, I am going to call him out right now for either lying or exaggerating about what happened.