This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent historian of the Latter Day Saints, the fur trade, and the trails of the American West. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan remained committed to interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence, leaving a legacy to inspire contemporary historians. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with the methodological shifts that coincided with his career: 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 work 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, Leonard Arrington, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, and Wallace Stegner, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Daniel Walker Howe
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: “A Thousand Utterly Trivial Things”
Part I: Mormon, Historian
1. “Under the Shadow of Her Love”: Family and a Salt Lake City Childhood, 1914–1929
2. “A Sense of Being Socially Maimed”: Salt Lake City’s West High School, 1929–1933
3. “The Strange Mixture of Emotion and Intellect”: The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1933–1938
4. Digression: Telling the Past in Latter-day Saint Utah, 1930s Style
5. “One of Those Minds Which Dwell in a Typewriter”: The Historical Records Survey, Ogden, Utah, 1938–1940
6.“This May Not Last, but It’s Fine While It Does”: The Utah Writers’ Project, Salt Lake City, 1940–1942
7. “Not So Dull as It Sounds”: Office of Price Administration, Washington, DC, 1942–1947
8. “It Is Best to Make the Most of My Opportunities”: The Guggenheim Fellowship Travel and Salt Lake City, 1947–1949
Part II: An Uncomfortable Interlude
9. Digression: Books and History in the Postwar Context
10. “I Am in for a Long Pull”: Job Seeker in Washington, DC, and Salt Lake City, 1950–1952
11. “Sundry Kinds of Hackwork”: Writing in Washington, DC, 1950–1952
12. “Half an Easterner and Three-Quarters a Westerner”: Writing Jedediah Smith and Salt Lake City, 1952–1953
Part III: Western American Historian
13.“It Is Something to Be On My Way Again”: Bancroft Library and the Navajo Project, Berkeley, California, 1954–1962
14. “Too Many Things Have Been Going On at the Same Time”: Writing, 1954–1963
15. “Too Many Obligations Out Here”: Turning Points and Departures
16. “Struggling to Get My Disordered Life Back Under Control”: Bancroft Library, Berkeley 1964–1965
17. “I Seem to Work All the Time”: Shifting Priorities, Berkeley, 1966–1968
18. “There Are All Sorts of Problems That Will Have to Be Worked Out”: New Directions, Berkeley, California, 1969–1970
19. “As Liable to Happen to Me as to Anyone Else”: Lafayette, California, and Accokeek, Maryland, 1970–1971
Epilogue. “If History Is Going to Stay Viable”: A Historian’s Life and Contexts
A Dale L. Morgan Bibliography
Works Cited
Index
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