Leonard J. Arrington Lecture to be Presented at Utah State University

The 12th Annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture at Utah State University will be presented Thursday, Sept. 21, 7 p.m., at the Logan LDS Tabernacle, 50 North Main. This year’s lecturer is noted educator and historian Thomas G. Alexander. The lecture is free and all are invited.

The public is invited to a pre-lecture open house in the Merrill-Cazier Library from 3-4:30 p.m. Guests may tour the Arrington Room in Special Collections and Archives (library lower level) and enjoy refreshments. The evening’s lecturer, Alexander, will be on hand as well.

 

Presented by Special Collections and Archives in the Merrill-Cazier Library at USU, the lecture is offered in conjunction with the Arrington Archives. The archive includes the personal and historical collection of the late Leonard J. Arrington, a renowned scholar of the American West. As part of that gift to the university, Arrington requested that the historical collection also become the focus for an annual lecture on an aspect of Mormon history. Honoring that request, the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series was established in 1995.

 

During a long and distinguished career, Arrington was a professor of economics at USU, church historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. He was the author of numerous books and articles.

 

The title of this year’s lecture is “Brigham Young, the Council of the Twelve, and the Latter-day Saint Investigation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.”

 

In an outline for the lecture, Alexander provides an overview of his presentation.

 

Brigham Young first learned of the Mountain Meadows massacre Sept. 20, 1857, when Arapeen, a Ute chief, told him the Paiutes had murdered a party of immigrants, Alexander said. Additional information was supplied, also blaming the Indians. The story began to unravel in the summer of 1858 when a report of Jacob Hamblin and an investigation by George A. Smith and Amasa M. Lyman showed complicity by Mormon militiamen.

 

Alexander said his presentation relies on available evidence, rather than supposition, to unravel the story of what the church leadership knew, of when they knew it, and of their efforts to bring the guilty to justice, while shielding themselves and the Mormon people from unfounded charges.

 

Alexander is the Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Western American History at Brigham Young University. He taught at BYU 40 years — from 1964 to 2004. He also taught at USU, the University of California at Berkeley, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah. He is an active participant in the Western History Association, served as its parliamentarian since 1978 and is currently a member of the WHA council. He is author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 24 books and monographs, more than 130 scholarly articles and scores of reviews and scholarly presentations.

 

He has won a number of prizes for his work, including the Mormon History Association best book awards for Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 and Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet, for which he also won the Evans Biography Award, based at Utah State University.

 

A student writing contest is offered in conjunction with the lecture. Interested college students in the region can find details on the Web. Information on the lecture and a detailed bibliography on the lecture topic is also available on the Web.

 

For more information about the Arrington Lecture, contact Brad Cole at Utah State University, (435) 797-8268.