The New Mormon History is the banner under which many professional historians today approach Latter-day Saint historiography. Scholars who embrace this term attempt to put significant events into context rather than bracketing data that might seem challenging to traditional assumptions. These scholars are also as interested in the experience of the rank-and-file as in the lives and edicts of the leaders, and pursue questions about women, minorities, domestic life, diet, fashion, and the common church experience. They employ statistical analysis and theories and methods of the social sciences in their work.

In this collection, D. Michael Quinn has selected fifteen essays which demonstrate the methods of this new history. Contributors include Thomas G. Alexander, James B. Allen, Leonard J. Arrington, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Eugene E. Campbell, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Mario S. DePillis, Robert B. Flanders, Klaus J. Hansen, William G. Hartley, Stanley S. Ivins, Dean L. May, Linda King Newell, B. H. Roberts, Jan Shipps, and Ronald W. Walker. Participants offer new ideas and give readers the opportunity to determine for themselves the relative success of these approaches by presenting examples. The collection demonstrates areas of interpretation that may be considered revisionist as well.

D. Michael Quinn(Ph.D., history, Yale University) is an Affiliated Scholar at the University of Southern California’s Center for Feminist Research. He has been a full-time researcher and writer, a professor of history at Brigham Young University, and a visiting professor of history (2002-03) at Yale. His accolades include Best Book awards from the American Historical Association and the Mormon History Association.

His major works include Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark, the two-volume Mormon Hierarchy series (Origins of Power, Extensions of Power), and Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example. He is the editor of The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past and a contributor to American National Biography;Encyclopedia of New York State; Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education; the New Encyclopedia of the American West; Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past; and others.

He has also received honors—fellowships and grants—from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Henry E. Huntington Library, Indiana-Purdue University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, he has been a keynote speaker at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, the Chicago Humanities Symposium, Claremont Graduate University, University of Paris (France), Washington State Historical Society, and elsewhere, and a consultant for television documentaries carried by the Arts and Entertainment Channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the History Channel, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).