Wednesday, Feb 21, 2024

EVENING WITH AN EDITOR
 

We are excited to announce that Richard L. Saunders will be here to speak about Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition (published by University of Utah Press) on Wednesday, Feb 21. He will be here from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., will speak at 6:00, and answer questions and sign books before and after that time. We hope you will be able to make it that night but, if not, we can mail a signed copy or hold one here at the store for pick-up.  To RSVP on Facebook, click here.

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This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent Western historian of the fur trade, historic trails, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan committed his life to tracking down sources and interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with methodological shifts in the historical profession, the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history, and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.
 
Morgan’s body of work and commitment to serious scholarship signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Leonard Arrington, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.

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Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition. University of Utah Press. 549 pp. Paperback, $34.95/Hardback, $95.00. To purchase online, click here.

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Richard L. Saunders is a librarian at Southern Utah University. He is the author of Eloquence from a Silent World: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Published Writings of Dale L. Morgan, and editor of Morgan’s writing in Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849–1869, and Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, 1939–1970.

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Also by Richard L. Saunders

The 1920 Edition of the Book of Mormon: A Centennial Adventure in Latter-day Saint Book History. W. W. Phelps Society & Greg Kofford Books, 2021 [2022]. Hardback. $79.95

Printing in Deseret. Mormons, Economy, Politics & Utah's Incunabula, 1849-1851: A History and Descriptive Bibliography. University of Utah Press, 2000. Hardback. Reg. $35.00, SALE $9.99 

Eloquence from a Silent World. A Descriptive Bibliography of the Published Works of Dale L. Morgan. Caramon Press, 1990. Hardback. Out of print. As new. $50.00