Leonard J. Arrington
LEONARD J. ARRINGTON was over his long career prolific researcher, writer and editor, Lemual Redd Professor of history at Brigham Young University, LDS church historian, director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute, mentor and friend to all those engaged in Mormon Studies. Among the twenty some books he wrote are Great Basin Kingdom, Brigham Young: American Moses, and Adventures of a Church Historian. He died in 1999.
Scholarly Studies of Mormonism in the Twentieth Century
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 1
Although reared in a Mormon home in Idaho and although my family were devout members of the Mormon faith, I was first introduced to Mormon studies as a graduate student in economics at the University…
Read moreIntroduction: The Future of Mormonism
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 3
Preface The articles in this section reveal the strength and vibrancy of current Mormon historiography. In December, 1965, in connection with the meetings of the American Historical Association at San Francisco, approximately 100 Mormon historians,…
Read moreThe Church Today | Robert Mullen, The Latter-day Saints: The Mormons Yesterday and Today, and Wallace Turner, The Mormon Establishment
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 4
The emergence of Michigan’s Governor George Romney as a strong contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968, the popular Mormon exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, and the spread of Mormon buildings and…
Read moreThe Founding of the L.D.S. Institutes of Religion
Articles/Essays – Volume 02, No. 2
An important facility near the campuses of colleges and universities in areas where there are substantial numbers of Mormons is the L.D.S. Institute of Religion.[1] In numbers of students the Institutes represent the most important…
Read moreThe Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History
Articles/Essays – Volume 03, No. 2
The philosopher Plato, to whom dialogue was the highest expression of intellectuality, denned thought as “the dialogue of the soul with itself.” It is thus altogether fitting that the editors of Dialogue should encourage Mormon…
Read moreThe Intellectual Tradition of the Latter-day Saints
Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 1
In one of the earliest books of imaginative literature about the Ameri can West (published in 1826), novelist-editor-missionary-biographer Timothy Flint reveals a common impression of the time that “in travelling towards the frontier, the decreasing…
Read moreWillard Young: The Prophet’s Son at West Point
Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 4
A common object of humor among visitors to Mormon Country in the nineteenth century was the large number of children. Many travellers’ accounts contain a version of the story of Brigham Young’s encounter with a…
Read moreThe Missouri & Illinois Mormons in Ante Bellum Fiction
Articles/Essays – Volume 05, No. 1
Our understanding of the American past has been greatly enriched in recent years by studies which have made use of literary sources. Few works, for example, surpass the challenging insights and interpretations of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), William R. Taylor’s Cavalier and Yankee (1961), Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964). Such studies have proved to be so useful that some historians now concede that a review of the contemporary fiction is a fruitful, if not an indispensable, preliminary to the search for historical truth in any period.
Read moreThe Writing of Latter-day Saints History: Problems, Accomplishments and Admonitions
Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 3
Twenty Years with Dialogue: Dialogue’s Valuable Service for LDS Intellectuals
Articles/Essays – Volume 21, No. 2
When the Mormon Church Invested in Southern Nevada Gold Mines
Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 2