Davis Bitton
Davis Bitton, professor of history at the University of Utah and co-author (with Leonard J. Arrington) of The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (1979).
Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 3
Almost from its beginning Mormonism was disparaged as funda mentally superstitious and irrational, with an appeal only for the poor and uneducated. Even before the description of Joseph Smith as “ignorant” and “illiterate” by the…
Read moreMormon Lives | No Author Given, Melvin J. Ballard: Crusader for Righteousness, and Robert H. Malan, B.H. Roberts: A Biography
Articles/Essays – Volume 02, No. 4
Among Mormon leaders of the past generation few were as charismatic as Melvin J. Ballard and B. H. Roberts. Both, in different ways, were significant in the shaping of twentieth-century Mormonism. Both deserve solid biographies.…
Read moreB.H. Roberts as an Historian
Articles/Essays – Volume 03, No. 4
In 1930, when B. H. Roberts published his six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned journals were silent. But he himself, with pardonable pride, had described his work as “monumental.” One Mormon, answering Bernard De Voto’s contemptuous description of Utah as an intellectual desert, hailed Roberts as “another Gibbon.” Although hyperbolic, the favorable judgment was in general well deserved….
Read moreUniversalizing Mormonism: The Mexican Laboratory: Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture by F. Lamond Tullis
Articles/Essays – Volume 21, No. 3