Collected Leonard J Arrington Mormon History Lectures

About the Authors

278 About the Authors Richard Lyman Bushman Richard L. Bushman was born in Salt Lake City in 1931. A Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate at Harvard University, he remained there for his master’s and Ph.D., taking the latter in the History of American Civilization in 1961. Over his academic career, Professor Bushman has taught at Harvard, Brigham Young University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware and is currently the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Charles Warren Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He is the author of From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765, for which he received the Bancroft Prize and the Phi Alpha Theta Prize; Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, for which he was awarded the Evans Biography Award; and more recently, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. The latter was a selection of the History Book Club and the Book of the Month Club. The author of many articles and essays, and a book review editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, he has served as director, department head, and administrator of various academic programs and has been twice elected to the Council of the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. Richard E. Bennett Born in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, Richard graduated with a B.A. in English literature from BYU in 1972 and with a master’s degree in history from the same school in 1975. Later he studied at Wayne State 279 About the Authors University, graduating with a Ph.D. in American intellectual history and archival management in 1984. After working as a curator of manuscripts at BYU from 1976 to 1978, he accepted a position as head of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, serving there for almost twenty years. During this time he also served as a business consultant to several large Canadian corporations in establishing successful records management and archival programs. In September 1997, he received an appointment to return to Brigham Young University as professor of church history and doctrine in the faculty of religious education. Through the years, Professor Bennett has been an active researcher and writer, publishing three books and a score of articles in professional journals on Mormon exodus history, the history of the American and Canadian West, and archival management. His books include Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die” (1987), and more recently We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1997). Howard R. Lamar By the early 1970s, Howard Lamar had redefined the study of the territorial era of the American West with his two books, Dakota Territory (1956) and The Far Southwest (1966) which looked at New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. He pushed on to comparative frontier studies, directing a wonderful seminar that examined South Africa and North America, and he was at work producing The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West (1977). He taught one of Yale’s most famous and popular undergraduate courses, a year-long survey of the history of the American West that went from Spanish exploration to the present day. From 1979 to 1985, he was dean of Yale College, which meant that he oversaw Yale’s entire undergraduate program, and in 1992-93 he served as president of Yale. During this period he also became Sterling Professor of History, perhaps the most prestigious academic appointment at the university. Despite his present emeritus status, he has not stopped being a remarkably productive scholar. The clearest proof is the publication of the magnificent New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998), which now sets the standard for reference works on the West. 280 Arrington Mormon History Lectures Claudia L. Bushman Reared in San Francisco, Claudia Bushman studied English literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. There she met and married Richard Bushman. She completed her M.A. at Brigham Young University with a focus on American literature, but her academic interests broadened to social history and women’s studies. Her doctoral dissertation at...