Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a two-part column. The second column is available here.
In his recent AHA presidential address, Edward Muir discussed the historian’s practice of conversing with the dead and the challenge we face when exploring archives, reading documents, or otherwise bringing voice those who can no longer speak. We can fall prey to “the mirror effect,” he argued, in which we read too much of ourselves into the lives of others.

The Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado Texas in 2006. Mpeinadopa/Wikimedia Commons/public domain
Thus, Muir pointed out, we can fall afoul of the subversive 17th-century Italian nun Suor Arcangela Tarabotti’s complaint: “I am curious to speak with the souls of dead men, for, to tell the truth, one hears nothing but lies from the living.”
As a historian of postwar American religion, these warnings feel especially acute, as my dissertation revisits a significant event in the fraught interaction between marginalized religions and the power of the state—an event I covered as a local newspaper reporter just 16 years ago.
On April 3, 2008, the state of Texas raided the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch outside Eldorado (pronounced with a long “a,” if you want to speak like a Texan). The authorities were investigating allegations of sexual abuse among the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and eventually removed more than 400 children—the largest such state action in history. Eleven men, including leader Warren Jeffs, were ultimately convicted of arranging or participating in marriages between teen girls and much older men.
For a year, I was the San Angelo Standard-Times’ lead reporter covering these events, entering into the public record descriptions, statements, and allegations for future historians to parse. As it turns out, one of those future historians is me. Talk about the mirror effect!
Journalists are trained to remove themselves from the stories they report, avoiding first-person writing, adopting the “view from nowhere,” and maintaining an authoritative tone that establishes the uncontested facts of history’s first draft. In many ways, this is an illusion. We—I—didn’t just report the facts of the FLDS raid; we shaped a narrative, one in keeping with certain norms of what constitutes “acceptable” religion (which I’ll discuss more in my next column).
Two examples show how this worked while highlighting the challenges and opportunities I and perhaps other historians face when confronting our own work as part of our research.
In 2005, the FLDS began building the YFZ Ranch in Schleicher County south of San Angelo, to the consternation of local residents and the fascination of many others. As the reporter whose beat included that county, I wrote a Sunday feature on the group. It ran at the top of the front page and, in retrospect, was a mess. Sensationalistic and inaccurate, it relied entirely on former members and “anti-cult experts”—the same mix of perspectives that led to bad reporting and tragic outcomes during the Branch Davidian raid just 12 years earlier.
Now, examining the history of news media coverage involving marginalized and fundamentalist religions, I have the tools to analyze such stories for the assumptions they contain, the myths they embrace, and the ways they contribute to hostile public sentiment that can be weaponized against these groups. It is uncomfortable, to say the least, to train this critical eye on my own work and recognize that, in at least this one instance, I was part of the problem.
Scholars have shown how this problem led to the Branch Davidian tragedy in 1993, the memory of which loomed large when the state entered the YFZ Ranch. It was certainly in my mind as I reported in 2008. When our reporter and photographer stationed in Eldorado told me ambulances had turned onto the caliche road heading to the ranch the evening of April 5 (the second full day of the raid), I called one of my key sources in those early days: Allison Palmer, the first assistant district attorney who was helping coordinate evidence collection at the ranch for use in any potential prosecutions. I had covered the cops-and-courts beat for three years, and we had developed a good working relationship.
“In preparing for entry to the temple,” Palmer told me, “law enforcement is preparing for the worst.” Ambulances had been summoned because FLDS members stopped cooperating once the ranch’s massive limestone temple became the focus of the state’s investigation. Medical personnel were needed “in case this were to go in a way that no one wants.”
If the FLDS story contained all the fuel for a sensationalistic national news story—a reclusive religious group, strikingly unusual styles of dress and hair, and allegations of sexual abuse—that quote threw the lit match. Reporters flocked from across the country, cable news covered it nonstop, and daily press conferences exploded from moderate affairs featuring maybe a dozen reporters in the Eldorado High School atrium to nearly a hundred in the cavernous main gallery of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.
The glare of such publicity no doubt changed the course of the raid, and while it might have become a media circus regardless, ultimately it was my conversation with Palmer that precipitated it.
Now, as a historian, my analysis of the raid must deal not only with the content and failures of my own and other journalists’ reporting but also the choices we made, the sources we cultivated, and the impact of the resulting stories on decisions reached by the state and the FLDS. It is likely not a coincidence, for example, that Texas newspapers tended to treat the state’s arguments with less skepticism than Utah newspapers did, not because Texas reporters were more hostile to the FLDS, but because we better knew and trusted the people, such as Palmer, who worked for the state.
Fortunately, Eldorado did not become “another Waco.” As a result, the raid has faded from public consciousness, even as the FLDS itself remains a constant focus of documentaries and memoirs. Most of the participants are still very much alive, likely troubling Suor Arcangela Tarabotti—but even more troubling for my research, one of those participants is me.
It’s a personal reminder to follow the advice I give to the students I teach: good history requires humility. Not all of us are direct participants in the events we study, but none of us is immune to hearing what we want to hear from our conversation partners, whether they are still alive or long dead.
Paul A. Anthony is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and an adjunct instructor of history at Northeast Lakeview College in San Antonio.
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