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The challenge of writing religious history is an old one.[1] The ancient Hebrews incorporated history into their scriptures, and Luke the physician is but one of the historians whose writings were canonized in the Christian New Testament. That the same facts could look quite different when viewed through a variant set of religious glasses was made clear, if it had not been so before, by the writing of St. Augustine’s City of God. The monastic and ecclesiastical histories of the Middle Ages tended to set forth the drama of salvation, while secular histories, when they finally began to appear, were little more than chronicles or annals of rulers and battles. Histories of families, guilds, towns and nations gave emphasis to the political and eco nomic realities of life but did so with little analysis. Indeed, history was more a branch of literature than of science. To worshipful and believing Christians, history was a vast pool from which could be drawn moral lessons, faith-promoting stories and examples of faith and dedication. 

The problem is that facts never speak for themselves. Chronicles and testimonies and stories mean different things to different people. The inevitability of diverse opinions on the meaning of historical events became clear early in Christian history. Could the real bearers of the Christian message be, not the successors to the bishop of Rome, but those who were being persecuted by the established Church—the Waldensians, for example? This version of “a saving remnant” was picked up by the Reformers in the sixteenth century, and the Reformation brought about a great confrontation of different versions of Church history: Catholics vied with Protestants, and Protestants with Protestants. The writers in all camps faced questions about assumptions, about interpreting events, about the metahistorical meaning behind the events. And there were practical, immediate questions. How open should the record be? Should the historian include activities by his religious leaders that did not edify? Was this not putting weapons in the hands of the enemy? Would it not destroy the great lesson-teaching capacity of history? Could the historian really establish without question the dealings of God in the affairs of men? 

Some of the histories, from all sides, treated the leading personalities as two-dimensional figures, actors in a morality play of right and wrong. Cochlaeus portrayed Martin Luther as a shallow, immoral rake who did not have a religious bone in his body.[2] The disgraceful immorality in the monasteries, on the other hand, served the Protestants nicely as a counter-theme and drew upon a widespread anti-clerical prejudice. Although imposing in bulk and useful in compiling scattered sources, the ponderous tomes of the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-1574) and the Ecclesiastical Annals (1588-1607) were but inflated 

pamphlets in their predictable partisanship. History was a weapon, and both sides—indeed, all sides—made use of it. 

But some of the problems would not go away. What did the historian do with sources, with primary documents, that did not fit readily into the interpretation he had already decided upon? And what did one do with documents that turned out to be spurious, as the techniques of textual criticism were brought to bear? We will be better able to understand the mind-set of the sixteenth century if we imagine the historian to be a novelist who feels justified in leaving out anything that doesn’t fit his purposes. As the creator of a story, he decides what goes in and what stays out. Confident of their right to decide the content of their works, historians may not have seen themselves as inventing a story, making it up from nothing, but they were positive that God had affirmed the great teaching function of history and that their primary task was to conform to what was consistent with His will. 

In this context there appeared a new approach: the secular treatment of religious history. Those aspects of religious history that were properly religious and hence controversial, even emotional and unprovable, were quietly ignored in order to write about such things as changes of administration, the publication of works, the issuing of concordats and other documents, church councils and colloquies, proselyting and conversions, and the establishment of new congregations. This history was administrative, geographic, eco nomic, political. Above all, it was external. It dealt with those matters that could be established clearly and beyond doubt. Sleidan’s Commentaries on the State of Religion and Public Affairs under Emperor Charles V (1555), the finest work of this kind, “set the tone and methodology of German and European Reformation history at least until the nineteenth century.”[3]

Although political and dynastic bias could affect such external treatments, it was possible to rally substantial agreement on such externals as councils and movements of peoples. What the approach left out—and this is a serious indictment of something that pretends to be religious history—was religion. 

Long before the restoration of the gospel in 1830, therefore, a series of questions about the relationship of history to religion had been raised. Was the primary purpose of such history to be faith-promoting? Should it ignore or leave out items that did not fit the purpose? Should the less than-admirable activities of religious leaders be mentioned? What reliance should be placed on interested testimony? Should the archives of churches be open to research? What does one do when anecdotes purveyed by earlier historians, especially if they filled a moral and faith-promoting purpose, lack credence in the light of later examination and possibly contradictory evidence? Are historians well advised to abandon that which they can get hold of only in part and with the greatest difficulty, namely, the spiritual and supernatural, in order to deal with mundane topics like changing administrations, the construction of chap els, and the establishment of new congregations? Is it possible for a non believer to write accurate and reliable history about religion? For that matter, is it possible for a believer to write accurate and reliable history about his church? And should the denomination paying the piper—employing the historian—call the tune? Every one of these questions had been raised and wrestled with before the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1830. 

Writing LDS history, 1830–1890

When the Church was organized on April 6, 1830, the Lord commanded, by revelation, that “a record . . . shall be kept among you.”[4] In a subsequent revelation the responsibility of the historian was made more explicit: he was to “write and keep a regular history.”[5] At first, Oliver Cowdery was appointed to supervise their history-gathering efforts. His ecclesiastical responsibilities as Second Elder and, later, as Counselor in the First Presidency, being of a demanding nature, he was soon replaced by John Whitmer. Although he did compile a short chronicle of early activities, Whitmer proved to be not valiant, and George W. Robinson was appointed in his stead. When Willard Richards was appointed Church Historian in 1842, it became an established practice that an apostle serve as Church Historian; that tradition continued through such illustrious officials as George A. Smith, Wilford Woodruff, Albert Carrington, Orson Pratt, Franklin D. Richards, Anthon H. Lund, Joseph Fielding Smith and Howard W. Hunter.[6]

Thus, from the very day of the organization of the Church there was a Church Historian charged with the responsibility of keeping records and writing history. At the same time, at every stage in the history of the Church, others—private individuals independent of Church headquarters—joined in the task of making contributions to the writing and understanding of LDS history. Some of these made substantial contributions. 

The first systematic attempt to prepare a history of the growing Church began in 1839 when Joseph Smith and his clerks and associates began the preparation of a multi-volume documentary record called the “History of Joseph Smith.”[7] The manuscript for this history had progressed to August 5, 1838, when Joseph Smith was murdered on June 27, 1844. The scribes and clerks continued to assemble material and write in the years that followed. 

In the meantime, however, the manuscript of “History of Joseph Smith” was published serially in Times and Seasons (1842-1846, covering the years 1805-1834); Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star (1842-1845, covering years 1805 to 1844); and the Deseret News (1851-1858, covering the years 1834-1844).[8] The process of preparing these for publication in a multivolume bound work began in 1900, when George Q. Cannon was assigned by the First Presidency to begin the compilation. But his death in 1901 interrupted the task and it was reassigned to Brigham H. Roberts who, from 1906 to 1912, prepared “History of Joseph Smith” for publication. Unfortunately, Roberts subtitled this History of the Church, Period I: “History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, by Himself,” thus creating a misunderstanding that exists to this day. The entire work was compiled and written by church-employed scribes and clerks, using diaries of Joseph Smith, his clerks and associates, and other documents. Having been instructed to use the pronoun “I” because it was Joseph Smith’s history, the clerks continued that practice even after the Prophet’s death. The initial portions of the history (1805-1838) presumably benefitted from the perusal of the Prophet, but the remainder, covering the years 1838 to his death in 1844, were compiled and written after his death and could in no sense have had the benefit of his suggestions and corrections. Roberts’ edition even included some of his own corrections, deletions, and emendations, sometimes without explanation.[9]

After the “History of Joseph Smith” was completed (in 1856) to the death and burial of Joseph Smith (actually to August 8, 1844), the clerks in the office of the President of the Church continued it as the “History of Brigham Young.” As in the case of the Joseph Smith history, this was an “annals” approach to Church history, and documents from a wide variety of sources were used to tell not only the history of Brigham Young but the history of the Church over which he presided.[10] To this date, the only portion of this history, which consists of forty-eight volumes of about one thousand pages each, that has been published is that from 1844 to 1848, issued under the editorship of B. H. Roberts in 1932 as Volume VII of History of the Church under the subtitle, “Apostolic Interregnum.”[11] Hopefully, additional volumes of the massive Brigham Young history will eventually be edited for publication. The volumes are in good quality up to about the year 1858, after which they partake more of the nature of a scrapbook of information. There appears to have been less attention to possible publication in compiling the work after 1858 than had been true during the compilation of the “History of Joseph Smith,” the “Apostolic Interregnum,” and the first ten years of Brigham Young’s presidency. 

The most systematic and professional attempt to collect, preserve, and write LDS history was launched in 1891 with the appointment of Andrew Jenson as Assistant Church Historian.[12] Jenson collected and wrote biographies of the founders and subsequent officers of the Church, published as Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols., 1901-1936; prepared a superbly useful encyclopedia of Church history, published in 1941 as Encyclopedic History of the Church; directed the preparation of a 700-volume scrap book record of the day-to-day activities of the Church, with excerpts from available sources, both published and unpublished, called the Journal History of the Church; and published numerous articles in professional and Church sponsored periodicals on subjects as varied as “Danes on the Isle of Man,” “History of the Las Vegas Mission,” “Orderville: An Experiment in a Communistic System, called the ‘United Order/” and “Day by Day with the Utah Pioneers.” He also wrote a full history of the Scandinavian Mission, which has stood well the test of time. Jenson’s work established the Church Historian’s Office as the indispensable and effective source of Latter-day Saint history. 

Survey Histories, 1879–1930

During Andrew Jenson’s lifetime of labor in the Church Historian’s Office, other historians, not with Church sponsorship but with Church cooperation, began to write narratives that were to some extent analytical and interpretive. The two principal contributors to Mormon historiography in the nineteenth century were Edward W. Tullidge and Hubert Howe Bancroft. With some access to documents in the Church Archives, Tullidge wrote The Life of Brigham Young; or Utah and Her Founders (New York, 1876); The Women of Mormondom (New York, 1877); Life of Joseph the Prophet (1878; revised ed. 1880); History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City, 1886); and History of Northern Utah and Southern Idaho (Salt Lake City, 1889).[13] These tend to be adulatory and are heavily documentary, but they are nevertheless valuable sources for early Utah history, and to a lesser extent, for early Mormon history. 

Bancroft, in his History of Utah, 1540 to 1886 (San Francisco, 1889), tells the story of the Mormons during the pre-Utah period as well as the history of Utah after the Mormons settled there. Much of the volume was written by Alfred Bates, one of Bancroft’s employees. Bancroft was supplied with a great deal of material by the Church and its members, and his interpretation was regarded as generally favorable to the Church, with the anti-Mormon alle gations carefully couched in the footnotes.[14]

In the same tradition followed Orson F. Whitney, an apostle and Assistant Church Historian. Whitney’s four-volume History of Utah (Salt Lake City, 1898 to 1904), written in sesquipedalian prose, is a compelling narrative of Utah’s history, from a Mormon point of view.[15] 

During the same years that Whitney served as Assistant Church Historian (1902-1906), a colleague of equal rank was Brigham H. Roberts. An old fashioned orator (as was Whitney) with a searching mind and majestic style, Roberts entered upon the writing of a comprehensive history which would counteract the unfavorable image of Mormonism resulting from the long antipolygamy crusade of the 1880s, the controversy over his own election to the House of Representatives in 1899, and the testimony given in the trial of Senator Reed Smoot for seating in the Senate in the early years of this century. Courageous and indefatigable, Roberts wrote a full history which appeared in serial form in the Americana magazine from 1909 to 1915. With some updating, this was published with additional material as a six-volume set in connection with the Church’s centennial observance in 1930 under the title A Comprehensive History of the Church: Century One (Salt Lake City, 1930). Roberts’ work, while still worth reading, is not a “definitive” work. Many documents since uncovered have altered some of his interpretations, and his preoccupation with the conflict between the Church and the Federal Government, and other personal biases are evident in his reconstruction of a number of critical episodes in Mormon history. Moreover, the volume fails to say much about cultural, social, and economic history, and covers only incompletely the years after 1915. It is an epic work, but not completely satisfactory for 1981 readers.[16]

The Professionalization of LDS History, 1920–1972

While no historian would wish to denigrate or detract from the enormous significance of the histories by Tullidge, Bancroft, and Elders Whitney and Roberts, it is nevertheless essentially true that “objective,” “scholarly,” and “systematic” treatises on the Mormons and their culture began in this century as a product of students’ work toward the Ph.D. in history and the social sciences.[17] One notes, in particular, the sociological dissertations of Ephraim Ericksen, Joseph A. Geddes, Lowry Nelson, and Thomas F. O’Dea; the eco nomic histories of Feramorz Y. Fox and (if I may be so immodest) Leonard Arrington; and the history dissertations of Andrew Love Neff, L. H. Creer, Joel Ricks, Thomas C. Romney, Milton R. Hunter, Richard D. Poll, S. George Ellsworth, Philip A. M. Taylor, Merle E. Wells, Eugene E. Campbell, Kent Fielding, Warren Jennings, Klaus Hansen, Cannon Hardy, Robert Flanders, and Jan Shipps. These are not all of the Mormon-related dissertations written from 1920 to 1972, but they are representative of the large volume of scholarly works written during that period. There are a few other works, such as those of Juanita Brooks, which are fully as scholarly as the doctoral dissertations mentioned. Less defensive than the earlier writers, these authors have been fully professional in identifying and using sources, more persistent in seeking additional information, and more willing to advance honest answers for hard questions. 

During the 1960s Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, Church Historian and Recorder, recognized the need for a professionalization of the Church Library and Archives and instructed his Assistant Church Historian, Earl Olson, to join and “be active in” professional library and archival societies.[18] Thus began, particularly after 1963, the employment of professional librarians and archivists, the systematic cataloguing of record books and manuscripts, the adoption of proper security measures and the planning for adequate facilities in the new Church Office Building the construction of which was first announced in 1960. When Elder Smith became president of the Church in 1970, he appointed Elder Howard Hunter, of the Council of the Twelve, as Church Historian and Recorder, with the understanding that Elder Hunter would further these efforts toward “professionalization.” As Elder Hunter’s Assistant Historian, Earl Olson continued to upgrade the Historian’s Office.

Meanwhile, a group of professional Mormon historians and some of their colleagues in the social sciences who were “kindred souls” in historical interest met in San Francisco in December 1965 to form the Mormon History Association. The aim of the Association was “to promote understanding, scholarly research, and publication in the field of Mormon history.” The Association has made annual awards to the authors of the best books and articles, has held meetings each year where scholars can share their research and writing, and sponsors a scholarly journal, The Journal of Mormon History, founded in 1974. The Association also undertakes special projects, such as the editing of special issues of other journals. Steadily growing in size, now including in addition to all historians working on Mormon subjects several hundred interested amateurs or “buffs,” the Association has been a powerful motivating and coordinating force in promoting Mormon history. 

Simultaneous with the formation of the Mormon History Association was the launching of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Historians have contributed regularly to the pages of Dialogue, which remains a major and welcome outlet for Mormon historical scholarship. Partly because of the com petition offered by Dialogue, Brigham Young University Studies, usually referred to simply as BYU Studies, was reinvigorated and began to feature historical essays. An enlarged summer issue, composed primarily of historical articles built around a common theme, has appeared annually since 1969, and “The Historian’s Corner” was inaugurated as a regular feature in 1970. In 1974 LDS women in the Boston area founded Exponent II, stimulating historical scholarship with respect to women in the LDS experience. Two years later a young group of Mormon intellectuals founded Sunstone. All of these carry articles on Mormon history. 

Activities of the History Division, 1972–1980

In 1972, with the imminent completion of the Church Office Building, of which the four-story East Wing would be dedicated to Church Library, Archives, and historical endeavors, Church Historian Howard Hunter recommended the organization of the Historical Department. Approved by the First Presidency and Council of Twelve Apostles in March 1972, the department was managed by Elder Alvin R. Dyer, an apostle and former member of the First Presidency. Donald T. Schmidt was appointed Church Librarian, Earl Olson, Church Archivist, and Leonard Arrington, Church Historian, with James B. Allen and Davis Bitton as Assistant Historians. Some time later, Florence Jacobsen was appointed Church Curator. With the exception of Elder Dyer, who served as the ecclesiastical overseer of the department, and Florence Jacobsen, who served on a “dollar a year” basis, the appointees and their staffs were Church employees, paid for their time and expertise. 

The principal departure from past tradition was the creation of the History Division which, under the direction of Leonard Arrington, was staffed with a dozen professional historians assigned to conduct research and writing projects on behalf of the Church. With ecclesiastical sanction, these and other historians, at Brigham Young University and elsewhere, were given full access to the Church Archives and commissioned to write accurate and reliable treatises on a variety of assigned topics. They have published two one-volume histories of Mormonism—the first, a 638-page narrative history primarily for Latter-day Saints; the second, a 400-page topical history, was written primarily for sale to libraries and non-Mormon readers. History Division historians have published four biographies, and four others are on the way; two histories of Church auxiliaries and departments, with one more on the way; and edited two book-length collections of documents, one of which has been published and the other on the way. All in all, History Division staff members, during the period 1972 to 1980, published fifteen books, with six others on the way; approximately one hundred professional articles, with twenty on the way; and published approximately 250 articles in Church magazines, with others on the way. The Division also sponsored a Task Paper Series in which thirty-three occasional papers were published. Division historians have writ ten articles for several encyclopedias, assisted religion editors of several news papers and magazines, and spoken before many learned societies. 

In terms of subject-matter, the History Division has made important contributions to the history of LDS women, the history of priesthood quorums and Church administration, the history of auxiliaries, and the histories of ethnic and national groups. We have done community histories, ward and stake histories, and advanced our knowledge of the roles of many individuals in Church history. One of our most significant contributions to Mormon historiography was the inauguration of an oral history program. Established in 1972, the program later received a large grant from the James Moyle Genealogical and Historical Association, and has since been called the James Moyle Oral History Program. To date the program, currently directed by Gordon Irving, has recorded some 1500 interviews with 750 persons, representing about 3,000 hours on tape. The bulk of the interviews have been conducted in English, but possibly 15 percent have been conducted in other languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, and German. Interviews for the program have been done not only in Salt Lake City and Provo, Utah, but also in several parts of Canada, South America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. Those interviewed have included General Authorities of the Church, administrators of Church programs, mission presidents and missionaries, officers of auxiliary organizations, oldtimers with interesting stories to tell, and articulate members with particular insights that are worth preserving. The task of documenting LDS history is one that will lie continually before us, and as time and resources are available Director Irving intends to continue to document the past and the present so as to preserve a record for the future. 

The History Division, I want to emphasize, at no time took the attitude that it should reserve to itself the research and writing of Mormon history. On the contrary, the Division assisted other historians, both Mormons and non-Mormons, by preparing research aids and indexes, by sharing research findings, and by commenting upon manuscripts submitted for “checking.” The Division gave encouragement to many scholars by granting special fellowships and agreeing to serve as co-sponsor of their books. These include several volumes of the projected “History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1980,” which have been prepared and approved and hopefully will be published under separate titles in the years to come by Deseret Book Company, BYU Press, and other university and commercial publishers. They also include The Expanding Church by Spencer Palmer, published in 1978; the biography of Heber C. Kimball by Stanley Kimball, published by the University of Illinois Press; the biography of Jedediah M. Grant by Gene S. Sessions, recently accepted by the University of Illinois Press; and Voices of Women by Ken and Audrey Godfrey and Jill Mulvay Derr, now being published by Deseret Book Company. Several other volumes are in process of preparation. 

I hope you will agree with me, on the basis of this recital and the personal knowledge many of you have of our work, that the History Division served well the interests of the Historical Department, the Church, and of Latter-day Saints generally during the period of its existence from 1972 to 1980. Perhaps because of this success, on the assumption that even more can be done in an academic setting, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, in July 1980, transferred the staff of the History Division from the Historical Department to constitute the newly created Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at Brigham Young University. President Spencer W. Kimball stated in announcing the transfer:[19]

The stature, objectivity and effectiveness of our fine professional historians will be enhanced by association with the church’s university, where they can perform their scholarly tasks in a university atmosphere with increased interchange with professional colleagues and the teaching process. 

The Reconciliation of Faith and History

I mentioned at the start of this paper some of the challenges of writing religious history.[20] On the one hand the historian must convey the facts of history honestly and straightforwardly. The historian must strive against the conscious or unconscious distortion of events to fit the demands of current fashions; he must renounce wishful thinking. On the other hand, the religious historian wishes also to bear testimony of the reality of spiritual experience. We all know by now that the pretense of “objectivity” can mask a hypocritical dodge to cover up unspoken, perhaps even incorrect, assumptions. 

Some tension between our historical training and our religious commitments seems inevitable. Our testimonies tell us that the Lord is in this work, and for this we see abundant supporting evidence. But our historical training warns us that the accurate perception of spiritual phenomena is elusive—not subject to unquestionable verification. We are tempted to wonder if our religious beliefs are intruding beyond their proper limits. Our faith tells us that there is moral meaning and spiritual significance in historical events. But can we be completely confident that any particular judgment or meaning or significance is unambiguously clear? If God’s will cannot be wholly divorced from the actual course of history, can it be positively identified with it? Although we see evidence that God’s love and power have frequently broken in upon the ordinary course of human affairs in a direct and self-evident way, our caution in declaring this is reinforced by our justifiable disapproval of chroniclers who take the easy way out and use divine miracles as a short circuit of a causal explanation which is obviously, or at least defensibly, naturalistic. We must not use history as a storehouse from which deceptively simple moral lessons may be drawn at random. 

At the same time, I hope that LDS historians will be known for the sense of reverence and responsibility with which they approach their assignments. There should be a certain fidelity toward and respect for the documents. There should exist a certain feeling for human tragedy and triumph. LDS history is the history of Latter-day Saints, in their worship and prayer, in their mutual relationships, in their conflicts and contacts, in their social intercourse and in their solitude and estrangement, in their high aspirations, and in their fumbling weaknesses. We must be responsive to the whole amplitude of human concerns—to human life in all its rich variety and diversity, in all its misery and grandeur, in all its ambiguity and contradictions. 

Part of that human life, we must insist, is its religious dimension. The Latter-day Saint historian will not do his subject justice, will not adequately understand the people he is writing about, if he leaves out the power of testimony as a motivating factor in their lives. In his “Second Century Address” at Brigham Young University in 1976, President Kimball gave us wise counsel. “As LDS scholars,” he said, “you must speak with authority and excellence to your professional colleagues in the language of scholarship, and you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.”[21] The great histories of our people, most of which remain unwritten, will reflect both the rigor of competent scholarship and the sensitivity able to recognize, as the New Testament records, that “the wind bloweth where it listeth.”[22]

May we as historians lengthen our stride as we strive to develop these capacities, which will then enable us to write histories worthy of the marvelous work and a wonder that is our heritage. 

This speech was prepared for the Inaugural Lecture Series of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History, Brigham Young University, March 18, 198.

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[1] I acknowledge the help of my colleagues in the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History, Brigham Young University, in the preparation of this paper. I am particularly grateful for the help of Davis Bitton, Senior Historian, Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Professor of History at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. 

[2] Johannes Cochlaeus, Commentaria de Actis et Scriptis Lutheri (1549). 

[3] A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 202. 

[4] Doctrine and Covenants of the Church (Salt Lake City, 1935), 21:1.

[5] Doctrine and Covenants, 41:1. 

[6] See Leonard J. Arrington, “The Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History,” Dia logue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 3 (Summer 1968): 56-66. 

[7] On this and the following paragraph, see “Writing the History of Joseph Smith,” in Howard C. Searle, “Early Mormon Historiography: Writing the History of the Mormons, 1830-1858” (Ph. D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 200-336. Also Dean C. Jessee, “The Writing of Joseph Smith’s History,” BYU Studies, 11 (Summer 1971): 439-473. 

[8] Searle, p. 220. Also Dean C. Jessee, “The Reliability of Joseph Smith’s History,” Journal of Mormon History, 3 (1976): 23-46. 

[9] See Davis Bitton, “B. H. Roberts As an Historian,” Dialogue, 3 (Winter 1968): 25-44; and David J. Whittaker, “Historians and the Mormon Experience: A Sesquicentennial Perspective,” paper presented to the Sidney Sperry Symposium on Church History, Brigham Young University, January 26, 1980, typescript generously furnished by the author. 

[10] See “The History of Brigham Young,” in Searle, pp. 337-357. 

[11] See also Elden J. Watson, ed., Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 1801-1844 (Salt Lake City: Privately published, 1968); and Elden J. Watson, ed., Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 1846-1847 (Salt Lake City: Privately published, 1971). 

[12] Keith W. Perkins, “Andrew Jenson: Zealous Chronologist” (Ph. D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1974); Louis Reinwand, “Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Historian,” BYU Studies, 14 (Autumn 1973): 29-46; and Autobiography of Andrew Jenson (Salt Lake City, 1938). 

[13] William F. Lye, “Edward Wheelock Tullidge: The Mormons’ Rebel Historian,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1960): 56-75; Ronald W. Walker, “Edward Tullidge: Historian of the Mormon Commonwealth,” Journal of Mormon History, 3 (1976): 55-72. 

[14] John W. Caughey, Hubert Howe Bancroft, Historian of the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946); S. George Ellsworth, “Hubert Howe Bancroft and the History of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 22 (Autumn 1956): 99-124; and Ellsworth, “A Guide to the Manuscripts in the Bancroft Library Relating to the History of Utah,” ibid., 22 (Winter 1956): 197-247. 

[15] Woodruff C. Thomson, “Orson F. Whitney, Mormon Writer” (Master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1949). 

[16] Truman G. Madsen, Defender of the Faith: The B. H. Roberts Story (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980); and Davis Bitton, “B. H. Roberts as Historian,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Winter 1968): 25-44. 

[17] In what follows, see Leonard J. Arrington, “Scholarly Studies of Mormonism in the Twentieth Century,” Dialogue, 1 (Spring 1966): 15-28; and Arrington, “The Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History,” ibid., 3 (Summer 1968): 56-65. 

[18] In what follows see especially Leonard J. Arrington, “Historian as Entrepreneur: A Personal Essay,” BYU Studies, 17 (Winter 1977): 193-209. 

[19] “New Institute at Y. to Assume Role of Church History Division,” Church News, 5 July 1980. 

[20] In what follows I have benefitted from reading the essays in C. T. Mclntire, ed., God, History, and Historians: An Anthology of Modern Christian Views of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970); and George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion (New York, 1936). 

[21] Spencer W. Kimball, “Second Century Address,” BYU Studies, 16 (Summer 1976): 446.

[22] John 3:8.