{"id":47908,"date":"2024-09-10T10:18:08","date_gmt":"2024-09-10T16:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47908"},"modified":"2024-09-10T10:18:08","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T16:18:08","slug":"proto-new-mormon-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/09\/proto-new-mormon-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Proto New Mormon History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The \u201cNew Mormon History\u201d was an era when Latter-day Saint historians began to rely on the techniques of modern academic and professional historians in their approach to research and writing about the Church. Leonard J. Arrington is, in many ways, the face of this movement and was given the moniker of \u201cthe Father of Mormon History\u201d as a result. What is sometimes overlooked, however, was that the people doing \u201cNew Mormon History\u201d built on the shoulders of a circle of earlier historians. A central figure in that group was Dale L. Morgan<\/a>. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk<\/em>, biographer Richard Saunders discussed the life and legacy of Dale L. Morgan. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

First off, Richard Saunders described who Dale Morgan was and why he was significant:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Morgan was a mid-century historian of Western America and the Latter Day Saints. He started but never completed a history called The Mormons<\/em> in the 1940s. Morgan was the one Leonard Arrington<\/a> came to for criticism and support early in his career, and he was the one who made Fawn Brodie\u2019s No Man Knows My History<\/em> and Juanita Brooks\u2019 Mountain Meadows Massacre<\/em> relevant works of actual history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unintentionally he was the central figure tying together \u201cMormondom\u2019s Lost Generation\u201d writers, historians and novelists who moved Latter-day Saints into the American mainstream during the 1930s and 1940s, before the academically driven \u201cNew Mormon History\u201d became a thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The term \u201cNew Mormon History,\u201d Saunders explained, was<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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coined by ethnic historian Moses Rischin in 1969. He saw the flowering of academic interest in the Latter Day Saints as a meaningful departure from the old nineteenth century polemics. Rischin identified Thomas F. O\u2019Dea\u2019s The Mormons<\/em> (1957) as the departure point. Rischin\u2019s piece was only a one-page essay, but it had a huge impact on the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think his view is useful, but misses the much more significant departure that had happened two decades earlier with Nels Anderson, Dale Morgan, and their circle of non-academic writers. This earlier generation had been the one for whom the search for contemporary documentation became a mission. Academic historians benefitted from not only their professional training, but particularly from that earlier spadework. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think a good argument could be made that Morgan was inadvertently the initial published representation of that broad change. His 1940 work The State of Deseret<\/em> seems to be the first study on the Latter-day Saints that reflects modern standards for documentation and scholarly approach. There are earlier works by academics, but they tend to reflect scholarship of their times, being highly interpretive and less well documented, mostly rehashing published matter. Notice Morgan\u2019s monograph appears 17 years prior to O\u2019Dea\u2019s book and nearly two decades before Arrington\u2019s Great Basin Kingdom<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNew Mormon History\u201d was an important movement, but it benefitted from the work of Dale Morgan and his associates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dale Morgan\u2019s influence extended beyond the works about the western United States and the fur trade that he published. As Saunders put it, \u201cMorgan\u2019s real contribution to history was as a mentor, sign post, and sounding board. That is harder to trace because he trained no graduate students and had no advanced degree at a time when history was professionalizing. Plus, it was becoming much harder for non-academics to find a voice.\u201d For example, he mentored Fawn Brodie in her production of a biography about Joseph Smith (No Man Knows My History<\/em>) and Juanita Brooks in her important work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fawn Brodie won the Knopf prize for biography in 1942, which launched her Joseph Smith biography project. She approached Morgan while both were living in Washington DC and he immediately became a major source for her notes. He read and critiqued the manuscript twice before publication and helped her turn her approach and writing from polemic into a serious work of history. No matter what one may think about the book or author personally, No Man<\/em> remains the most significant Latter-day Saint book of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morgan almost single-handedly made Juanita Brooks\u2019 Mountain Meadows Massacre<\/em>. Brooks decided she wanted to write about the massacre in 1937, and told Morgan so by 1941, but she imagined the story as an article in Harper\u2019s like her earlier \u201cThe Water\u2019s In.\u201d Morgan convinced her that it had to be a real book, had to be told factually, and had to be documented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Mountain Meadows Massacre<\/em> is the only one of her works with substantive footnotes, and none of the citations to federal sources or contemporary newspapers came from her own research. Probably half or more of the book\u2019s cited sources were supplied by Dale Morgan, not her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morgan also insisted the publisher of Mountain Meadows Massacre<\/em> had to be reputable enough to withstand pressure from the church. He was the one that suggested and approached Stanford through Wally Stegner. As he lay dying from cancer twenty years later, Brooks wrote him \u201cI myself owe so much to your guidance, though I can hardly claim to be an historian. You were right when you said my area is folklore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While the historians he helped were not always friendly to the Church (Morgan himself was not), the emphasis on returning to the original sources that Morgan championed elevated these histories and provided some of the impetus for the development of the \u201cNew Mormon History.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more on Dale L. Morgan<\/a>, head on over to read the full interview with Richard L. Saunders at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk<\/em>. While you\u2019re there, check out the Brigham Young Quotes<\/a> page and my latest piece on Zera Pulsipher<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cNew Mormon History\u201d was an era when Latter-day Saint historians began to rely on the techniques of modern academic and professional historians in their approach to research and writing about the Church. Leonard J. Arrington is, in many ways, the face of this movement and was given the moniker of \u201cthe Father of Mormon History\u201d as a result. What is sometimes overlooked, however, was that the people doing \u201cNew Mormon History\u201d built on the shoulders of a circle of earlier historians. A central figure in that group was Dale L. Morgan. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, biographer Richard Saunders discussed the life and legacy of Dale L. Morgan. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2890],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-desk"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47909,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47908\/revisions\/47909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}