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Project Team
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Marlin K. Jensen
Executive Director and Church Historian and Recorder
Marcus B. Nash
Assistant Executive Director
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Assistant Church Historian and Recorder
EDITORIAL BOARD
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Assistant Church Historian and Recorder
Reid L. Neilson
Managing Director, Church History Department
Matthew J. Grow
Director, Publications Division, Church History Department
Max J. Evans
Church History Specialist, Church History Department
NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD
Stephen J. Stein
Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, of Religious Studies and Adjunct Professor of American History and American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington
Harry S. Stout
Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University
Terryl L. Givens
James A. Bostwick Chair and Professor of Literature and Religion, University of Richmond
Susan Holbrook Perdue
Program Director, Documents Compass, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, University of Virginia
GENERAL EDITORS
Dean C. Jessee
Ronald K. Esplin
Richard Lyman Bushman
MANAGING EDITOR
Ronald K. Esplin
ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR
Jeffrey N. Walker
PROGRAM MANAGER
David L. Willden
PRODUCTION MANAGER
R. Eric Smith
PROJECT ARCHIVIST
Robin Scott Jensen
DOCUMENT SPECIALISTS
Christy L. Best
Jeffrey G. Cannon
Sharalyn D. Howcroft
VOLUME COEDITORS
Mark Ashurst-McGee
Alexander L. Baugh
Joseph F. Darowski
Kay Darowski
Karen Lynn Davidson
Gerrit Dirkmaat
Matthew C. Godfrey
Steven C. Harper
William G. Hartley
Andrew H. Hedges
Michael Hubbard MacKay
Gordon A. Madsen
Max H. Parkin
Brent M. Rogers
Alex D. Smith
Grant Underwood
David J. Whittaker
Robert J. Woodford
CONSULTING SCHOLAR
John W. Welch
RESEARCH AND REVIEW EDITORS
Richard Lloyd Anderson
Richard L. Jensen
PRODUCTION EDITORS
Kathryn T. Burnside
Constance Palmer Lewis
Riley M. Lorimer
Larry E. Morris
Sharon E. Nielsen
Rachel Osborne
Amanda Owens
Alison Palmer
Nathan N. Waite
EXECUTIVE BIOGRAPHIES
Marlin K.
Jensen
was named a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 1 April 1989. He is currently serving as executive director of the Church History Department and as Church historian and recorder. Elder Jensen previously practiced law in Ogden, Utah, specializing in business and estate planning. He is a partner in a family ranching enterprise. He received his bachelor’s degree in German from Brigham Young University and his JD from the University of Utah College of Law. He chairs the executive committee of The Joseph Smith Papers.
Marcus B. Nash
was named a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 1 April 2006. He is currently assistant executive director of the Church History Department. Elder Nash was a partner in a major Seattle law firm at the time he was appointed to the Seventy. He received a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a JD from Brigham Young University. He is a member of the executive committee of The Joseph Smith Papers.
Richard E.
Turley Jr.
was appointed assistant Church historian and recorder for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 12 March 2008. Prior to this appointment, he served as managing director of the Family and Church History Department, four years as managing director of the Family History Department, and fourteen years as managing director of the Church Historical Department. His book Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (University of Illinois Press, 1991) is an oft-cited history of the famous Hofmann forgery-murder case of the 1980s. He serves as a member of the executive committee of The Church Historian’s Press, chairman of the editorial board for The Joseph Smith Papers, and as general editor of the Journals of George Q. Cannon. He is the coauthor, with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, of Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. He coedited the second volume in the Revelations and Translations series of The Joseph Smith Papers (published 2011).
Reid L. Neilson
is managing director of the Church History Department. He received his BA in international relations from Brigham Young University in 1996. After graduation he worked for Arthur Andersen’s Strategy, Finance, and Economics Division in Los Angeles and London, consulted for Walt Disney’s Strategic Planning Division in Tokyo, and researched for the University of Michigan Business School’s Asia-Pacific Human Resources Partnership in Hong Kong. He also took graduate degrees in American history and business administration at BYU in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In 2006 he completed his PhD in religious studies (American religious history emphasis) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was named an International Studies Scholar for Tomorrow Fellow. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of LDS church history and doctrine at BYU before joining the Church History Department in 2009. Dr. Neilson is the author of several books and the editor or coeditor of over a dozen volumes. He is a member of the editorial board of The Joseph Smith Papers.
Matthew J. Grow
is director of publications at the Church History Department and a member of the editorial board of The Joseph Smith Papers. He was previously an assistant professor of history and director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (Yale University Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association and of the 2011 Evans Biography Award; and coauthor, with Terryl Givens, of Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has published articles in Journal of the Early Republic, Church History, American Nineteenth-Century History, Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, and Utah Historical Quarterly. He received his PhD in American history from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.
Max J. Evans
is a church history specialist in the Church History Department and a member of the editorial board of The Joseph Smith Papers. He previously served as executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission from 2003 to 2008. After working as a graduate editorial assistant with the Western Historical Quarterly and earning a master’s in history from Utah State University, Evans began his career in 1971, working in the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He accepted an appointment as assistant archivist for the state of Wisconsin in 1977 and later became director of the Wisconsin state historical library. He also served for sixteen years as the director of the Utah State Historical Society with responsibility for the state history museum, the library and manuscript collections, and a grants program. He also served as the state historic preservation officer and as editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly. He is a fellow of the Society of American Archivists and has published both scholarly and professional studies.
NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD BIOGRAPHIES
Stephen J.
Stein,
a member of the National Advisory Board of The Joseph Smith Papers, is Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, of Religious Studies and Adjunct Professor of American History and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a PhD degree from Yale University. He joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1970. Among his extensive writings are books dealing with Jonathan Edwards, alternative religions, and apocalypticism. He is the editor of three volumes in the Yale University Press edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, and the third volume of The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. He is the author of The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers and Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America. He is currently serving as the general editor of the projected three-volume The Cambridge History of Religions in America.
Harry S. Stout,
a member of The Joseph Smith Papers National Advisory Board, is Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University and Chair, Department of Religious Studies. He received a BA degree from Calvin College, after which he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and University. He holds MA and PhD degrees from Kent State University. He taught at the University of Connecticut before joining the faculty at Yale in 1986. From 1991 until the present, he has served as the general editor, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, and general editor, Religion in America, a series with more than 30 books published to date. Among his published works, which include books, articles, review essays, and book reviews, are Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (coedited with Kenneth Minkema and Caleb Maskell), the award-winning Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and Stories of Faith, Stories of America: Religion in United States History (with Randall Balmer and Grant Wacker).
Terryl L.
Givens,
a member of The Joseph Smith Papers National Advisory Board, is James A. Bostwick Chair and Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond. He received a BA in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his religious studies work are several titles with Oxford University Press. His works include The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths and the Construction of Heresy; By the Hand of the Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion; and People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. His latest book is When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought (Oxford, 2009). He has also published essays in Romanticism, literary theory, and cultural studies.
Susan Holbrook Perdue,
a member of The Joseph Smith Papers National Advisory Board, is program director of Documents Compass, a newly created service that provides digital tools and methods to documentary editors. She is the current president of the Association for Documentary Editing. She was senior associate editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, associate editor of The Papers of John Marshall, and research and editorial assistant for The Papers of James Madison. She is the coeditor with Mary-Jo Kline of the third edition of A Guide to Documentary Editing.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
Richard Lloyd
Anderson
is a research historian and review editor for The Joseph Smith Papers and coeditor of the second volume of the Journals series (published 2011). His degrees consist of a BA, history, Brigham Young University; MA, classics, BYU; JD, Harvard Law School; and PhD, ancient history, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Understanding Paul (1983, 2007 rev. ed.), Joseph Smith’s New England Heritage (1971, 2003 rev. ed.), Investigating the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (1981), study guides on the life and teachings of Christ and early apostles, and many articles on early Christian history and early Mormonism. He is coeditor of the Documentary History of Oliver Cowdery. He served in World War II in the U.S. Navy as an aviation radioman. He retired as emeritus professor, BYU, after nearly forty years of teaching history and religion. Awards include Honors Professor of the Year and Phi Kappa Phi Award for Scholarship and Citizenship.
Mark
Ashurst-McGee
is a specialist in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He coedited volume one of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers (published 2008) and is coeditor of volume one in the Histories series. He is the author of peer-reviewed articles on Joseph Smith and early Mormon history.
Ronald O. Barney
serves The Joseph Smith Papers as coeditor of volumes in the Documents series. He was an executive producer for The Joseph Smith Papers Television Documentary Series, a weekly program that originally aired on Salt Lake City’s KJZZ-TV. He has history degrees from Weber State and Utah State universities. He was employed from 1977 to 2011 as an archivist and historian in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has worked for the Western Historical Quarterly and has taught as adjunct instructor of history at Weber State University. He has served on the executive board of the Mormon History Association and belongs to Utah Westerners. He has published several articles and three books, One Side by Himself: The Life and Times of Lewis Barney, 1808–1894 (2001), winner of the 2002 Evans Biography Award and the 2002 Best Biography Award from the Mormon History Association; The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record (2005), winner of the 2006 Utah State Historical Society Best Documentary Book Award; and W. Mack Watkins: A Biography (2010).
Alexander L. Baugh
serves as coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. A professor of LDS church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University, he received a BS from Utah State University and holds MA and PhD degrees from BYU. His career has included work as an instructor and director for the LDS Church Educational System. He is the author or editor of five books on early Mormon history. His published articles have appeared in BYU Studies, the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, Mormon Historical Studies, the Ensign, The Religious Educator: Perspectives of the Restored Gospel, and BYU Religious Education Review. He has also contributed numerous chapters in various books. Currently, he also serves as editor of Mormon Historical Studies. The recipient of awards from the Mormon History Association for his scholarly works, he is completing a book manuscript on the Haun’s Mill massacre that occurred in northern Missouri in 1838.
Christy L. Best
is a document specialist for The Joseph Smith Papers, providing provenance information for texts. She also assists with handwriting identification. The recipient of a BA degree in history from Brigham Young University, she has been an employee of the Church History Department since 1974 and was a certified archivist from 1989 to 2007. Her emphasis as an archivist is on nineteenth-century Mormon manuscripts.
Kathryn
Burnside
is a source checker for The Joseph Smith Papers and provides research, proofreading, and other support to the production and copyediting team. She received a BS degree in history with a public history emphasis from Weber State University. Her public history work has included research and writing for the U.S. Forest Service (Region 4), oral history interviewing and transcription for the Morgan County Veteran Project and the Ogden 25th Street Project, and record collection for the Mount Benedict Monastery Archives.
Richard Lyman
Bushman,
a general editor of The Joseph Smith Papers along with Ronald K. Esplin and Dean C. Jessee, is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University and former Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He received his BA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware before joining the Columbia faculty. His published works include From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (1967), King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985), and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992). He has served as president of the Mormon History Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. His books on Mormon themes include Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), and Believing History (2004).
Jeffrey G.
Cannon
is a document specialist, overseeing transcription and document control for The Joseph Smith Papers. A graduate student in the Department of Church History and Church Polity at the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Theology, he is currently writing a thesis on the role of religion in Afrikaner ethnic identity and the Afrikaner response to early Latter-day Saint proselytizing in the Cape Colony. His other research interests include the historical development of Mormon liturgy and ecclesiology and Catholic theology and culture. A graduate of Brigham Young University, he did his undergraduate work in political science and African studies while working as a teaching assistant in the Department of Political Science and a research assistant for The Joseph Smith Papers.
Joseph F.
Darowski,
with The Joseph Smith Papers since 2002, serves as coeditor of volumes in the Documents series. He holds a BS from Cornell and an MA in history from Brigham Young University and has done additional graduate work at the College of William and Mary. He earned a diploma from the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previously, he was a developmental editor for college textbooks.
Kay Darowski
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers and supervises student research assistants on the project. She has a BA in history, coursework completed for an MA in history at Brigham Young University, and a diploma from the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has worked at Petersburg National Battlefield in Petersburg, Virginia, and the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. She has been a developmental editor and copy editor for college history textbooks, as well as for other books and articles.
Karen Lynn
Davidson
is coeditor of volumes one and two of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers. She received BA and MA degrees from Brigham Young University and holds a PhD from the University of Southern California. She received two postdoctoral fellowships: USC Graduate Dean’s Exchange Fellowship to Cambridge University, England (1971–1972), and NEH Fellowship to University of Chicago (1979–1980). She is a former member of the English faculty and director of the honors program at BYU. She is author of Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages (1988) and coeditor of Out of the Black Patch: The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack (1990). With Jill Mulvay Derr, she compiled and edited Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry (2009), winner of the 2010 Steven F. Christensen Best Documentary Award from the Mormon History Association.
Gerrit Dirkmaat
is a coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received his PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2010 where he studied nineteenth-century American expansionism and foreign relations. His dissertation was titled “Enemies Foreign and Domestic: US Relations with Mormons in the US Empire in North America, 1844–1854.” He served as the senior assistant editor of Diplomatic History from 2003 to 2009.
Ronald K. Esplin
is a general editor, along with Dean C. Jessee and Richard Lyman Bushman, of The Joseph Smith Papers. He is also the project’s managing editor. He received history degrees from the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, and Brigham Young University. From 1972 until 1980, he was part of the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with assignments both as a researcher and writer and as an archivist. He moved to Brigham Young University in 1980 when the History Division was transferred there to become the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. From 1986 through 2002, he served as managing director of that research institute and as a professor of church history and doctrine. From 1988 to 1991, he served as one of the editors for Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Most of his publications have involved Brigham Young and early Utah or pre-Utah Mormon history, including Men with a Mission: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the British Isles, 1837–1841. Many of them also concern Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint leadership. He served as president of the Mormon History Association from 2006 to 2007.
Matthew C.
Godfrey
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a PhD in American and public history from Washington State University. Before joining the project, he worked for eight years at Historical Research Associates, a historical and archeological consulting firm headquartered in Missoula, Montana, serving as president of the company from 2008 to 2010. He is the author of Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921 (2007), which was a co-winner of the Mormon History Association’s Smith-Petit Award for Best First Book. He has also published articles in Agricultural History and Pacific Northwest Quarterly and has presented papers at conferences of the Mormon History Association, the National Council on Public History, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Western History Association, among other organizations.
Steven C.
Harper
serves on The Joseph Smith Papers as coeditor of volumes in the Documents series. He was coeditor of volume one of the Revelations and Translations series (published 2009). He is an associate professor of LDS church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. He taught religion and history at BYU–Hawaii from 2000–2001 before joining the BYU faculty in 2002. He earned his PhD in early American history from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He received research fellowships from the Quaker Collection at Haverford College, the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. He is the author of Promised Land: Penn’s Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, and the Dispossession of Delawares 1600–1763 (2006) and articles on early Mormonism and the early American republic that have appeared in Religion and American Culture, Journal of the Early Republic, the Journal of Mormon History, and Mormon Historical Studies. Two of these were awarded the T. Edgar Lyon and Juanita Brooks awards by the Mormon History Association.
William G.
Hartley,
an associate professor of history, emeritus, at Brigham Young University, is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received BA and MA degrees in history from BYU and completed doctoral coursework at Washington State University. In 1972 he joined Church historian Leonard Arrington’s staff of research historians, writing Latter-day Saint history full time and helping launch the department’s oral history program. In 1980, after the staff transferred to BYU to become the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, he continued writing Mormon history and became an associate professor in the BYU History Department. His specialty areas include historical development of the priesthood, nineteenth-century Mormon emigration, and family biography writing. He has published sixteen books and more than one hundred articles in academic journals and church magazines and is the recipient of four best book awards and four best article awards from professional organizations. A past president of the Mormon History Association, he has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Mormon History and Mormon Historical Studies.
Andrew H. Hedges
is coeditor of volume two (published 2011) and volume three in the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received a PhD in American history from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, an MA in Near East studies from Brigham Young University, and a BS in zoology from Weber State College. Before joining the project, he was an associate professor of LDS church history and doctrine at BYU. He has published a variety of articles on early Mormon history and edited several volumes of scholarly essays, including Disciple as Witness (2000) and Disciple as Scholar (2000).
Sharalyn D.
Howcroft
has been employed by the Church History Department since 2000 as an assistant archivist and document specialist for The Joseph Smith Papers. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in English and a Hebrew language minor. After finishing an intensive Hebrew program in the Middle East, she completed an intensive Arabic program that was part of a Middle Eastern languages consortium at the University of Utah. She is pursuing an MA in library and information science with an archival concentration from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Richard L.
Jensen
is a senior writer, research historian, and review editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. He served as coeditor of volume one of the Journals series (published 2008) and is coeditor of volumes one and two in the Histories series. He has an MA, history, The Ohio State University, and a BA, history, Utah State University. He is author, coauthor, coeditor, or translator of books and articles about the history of the Latter-day Saints. He has had a particular interest in Latter-day Saints in and from Europe, particularly in the nineteenth century. He joined the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1972; was transferred in 1980 to Brigham Young University’s Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, where he first became involved with The Joseph Smith Papers; and was transferred again in 2005 to the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has served as book review editor for the Journal of Mormon History, member of the board of the John Whitmer Historical Association, and member of the council of the Mormon History Association (MHA). He is secretary-treasurer of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study and president-elect of MHA.
Robin Scott
Jensen
is the lead archivist for The Joseph Smith Papers and coedited the first two volumes in the Revelations and Translations series (published 2009 and 2011, respectively). He specializes in document and transcription analysis. In 2005 he earned an MA degree in American history from Brigham Young University, and in 2009 he earned a second MA in library and information science with an archival concentration from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is now pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Utah. He completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2007. He has published several articles and edited documents and has presented papers at various scholarly conferences.
Dean C. Jessee
is one of the general editors of The Joseph Smith Papers, with Ronald K. Esplin and Richard Lyman Bushman. He received an MA degree in LDS church history from Brigham Young University. His career includes working for the Archives and the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1964 to 1981, followed by nineteen years’ service at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University. His years of gathering and publishing Joseph Smith documents laid the groundwork for the current Joseph Smith Papers. His publications include Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (1984, 2001); Papers of Joseph Smith, vols. 1 and 2 (1989, 1991); Brigham Young’s Letters to His Sons (1974); and numerous articles dealing with aspects of nineteenth-century Mormon history. He is a past president of the Mormon History Association.
Constance Palmer
Lewis
is a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. She earned a BA degree in psychology and history at Emory University, where she assisted in gathering data for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. She did graduate work in education at Emory and at Georgia State University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in history at the University of Utah. She worked as a research assistant for Project Talent at the American Institutes for Research, and she taught history for several years at Red Fern Academy, a cooperative home school. She has written and edited articles on family history and church history for the Ensign magazine. She completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2010.
Riley M.
Lorimer
is a production editor and typesetter for The Joseph Smith Papers. She coedited the second volume in the Revelations and Translations series (published 2011). The recipient of a BA in English with a minor in editing from Brigham Young University, she is currently pursuing an MA in English with an emphasis in British literature from the University of Utah. She has written and edited for the New Era, BYU Magazine, and other publications. Her research has focused on the literature and history of the Renaissance in Britain, and she currently serves as secretary of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. She completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2011.
Michael Hubbard
MacKay,
a coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, received his PhD from the University of York, England, where he studied modern cultural history and focused on the history of science and medicine. He received an engineering degree while in the Air Force, followed by a double major in history and political science at Weber State University, and an MA in culture and modern history at York. He has taught world history and the history of science and medicine at Brigham Young University and world history as an adjunct instructor at Weber State University. His research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
Gordon A.
Madsen
serves The Joseph Smith Papers as senior coeditor of the Legal and Business Records series. He received BS and JD degrees from the University of Utah. He served as Utah deputy district attorney from 1957 to 1959 and as assistant attorney general, 1959–1964. He has been in private practice since 1964. His civic and professional contributions include being a member, Constitutional Revision Commission; member, Judicial Qualifications Commission; member, Judicial Nominating Commission (Third Judicial District); chairman, Eminent Domain Section and Legislative Section of Utah State Bar; and member, Utah House of Representatives, 1969–1971. Among his publications are “State Police Power Held to Override Bankruptcy Act in Financial Responsibility Case,” Personal Finance Law Quarterly 16.3 (Summer 1962): 97–100; “Joseph Smith’s 1826 Trial: The Legal Setting,” BYU Studies 30.2 (Spring 1990): 91–108; and “Joseph Smith and the Missouri Court of Inquiry,” BYU Studies 43.4 (2004): 93–136.
Larry E. Morris
is a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. He was previously an editor with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, at Brigham Young University. He has published articles on early Mormon history in BYU Studies, the FARMS Review, and The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. He is coeditor (with John W. Welch) of Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness (Maxwell Institute, 2006). He is also the author of The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers after the Expedition (Yale University Press, 2004). He completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2010. He received a BA in philosophy and an MA in American literature, both from BYU.
Sharon E.
Nielsen
is a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. Her primary assignment is preparing content for the project’s website. She received a BA in Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University and an MA in ancient civilizations and biblical studies from the University of Michigan. Previously she worked as a manager of data collection for a Civil War research project directed by the Center for Population Economics, Chicago, and as an assistant editor for the Occasional Papers series at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, at Brigham Young University. She has also worked as an independent genealogist.
Rachel M. Osborne
serves as a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers, training and overseeing a team of source checkers and proofreaders. The recipient of a BA in English from Brigham Young University, she is currently pursuing an MA degree in history from the University of Utah. She worked as an editorial assistant for BYU Studies in 2005.
Amanda Owens
is a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. She received a BA in English literature and an MA in literature with an emphasis in children’s literature from Arizona State University. While pursuing her graduate degree, she taught GRE prep classes and began her editing career working on content for websites, academic journals, and a fashion magazine. She also freelanced as a book editor for several years. After graduating, she worked as an editor and project manager for a publishing company, producing online curriculum.
Alison Palmer
is a production editor and typesetter for The Joseph Smith Papers. She earned a BA degree in English with a minor in editing from Brigham Young University, where she worked as a writing tutor and as the producer of a university podcast. She also contributed research to BYU’s Victorian Short Fiction Project. After graduating, she completed an editorial internship with Covenant Communications and an editing internship in the Curriculum Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After working as a writer for a marketing company, she joined the team of The Joseph Smith Papers in May 2010. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in rhetoric and composition from the University of Utah.
Max H. Parkin
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received a BS degree in business from the University of Utah, an MA from Brigham Young University in history and philosophy of religion, and a PhD from BYU in LDS church history and doctrine. His thesis and dissertation were on aspects of Latter-day Saint history in Kirtland, Ohio, and Missouri, respectively. Some of his writings include Conflict at Kirtland (1967), a history of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio; and Sacred Places—Missouri, a history of Mormon sites in Missouri and Kansas. He has published articles in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Historical Atlas of Mormonism, the Encyclopedia of LDS History, and Regional Studies in Church History—Missouri, as well as in LDS church magazines and professional journals. He authored a chapter in Restoration Movement, a history text for the Graceland College of the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). He served as a volunteer researcher in the Museum of Church History and Art, was a lecturer on Sea Trek 2001, and taught for the Church Educational System for fifty years (professionally for thirty-eight years and twelve years as a volunteer), principally at the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah.
Brent M. Rogers
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. The recipient of a BA with honors in history from San Diego State University (2005) and an MA in public history from California State University, Sacramento (2007), he is currently completing a PhD in nineteenth-century United States history from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His dissertation, titled “Crossroads of the Antebellum West: Sovereignty, Ideologies of Empire, and Utah Territory,” examines the federal-territorial conflict in Utah during the 1850s as a case study to understand American and Mormon attitudes concerning sovereignty and power. Further, it seeks to explain the intricate connections of Utah Territory to antebellum national ideas of citizenship, gender, Native American affairs, and empire in the West. He previously served as a digital editor and research fellow for the Papers of William F. Cody and as an instructor for the history department’s senior capstone seminar at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He has produced scholarship on digital history, history of the American West, and Mormon history.
Alex D. Smith
is coeditor of volume two (published 2011) and volume three in the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received MA (2002) and BA (1998) degrees in history from Brigham Young University. He was a research historian and document editor with the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, where he first began working for the Papers. His research interests and project specialization focus on the history of the church in Nauvoo. He also serves as a photographer for The Joseph Smith Papers.
R. Eric Smith
is production manager for The Joseph Smith Papers. He has significant research and editing experience in early Mormon history and is the editor of numerous documents and other materials published in print or electronically. Before joining the project, he was an editor for the Curriculum Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for ten years. He practiced law for a Salt Lake City firm and was an editorial assistant for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and for the Utah Law Review. He received a BA degree in English from Brigham Young University and a JD from the University of Utah.
Grant
Underwood
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He received his PhD from UCLA, his MA and BA degrees from Brigham Young University. He is a professor of history at BYU. He is author of the prize-winning Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (1993), editor of two volumes on LDS history in the Pacific (2000), and author of a number of articles on Mormon history.
Nathan N. Waite
is a production editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA in American studies from the University of Utah. He completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2009. He has written and edited for BYU Magazine, the Ensign, and other publications. Before joining the project, he worked as an editor and sales manager for Boston publisher David R. Godine.
Jeffrey N.
Walker
is the associate managing editor of The Joseph Smith Papers and series manager and coeditor of the Papers’ Legal and Business Records series. He completed a BS from Western Michigan University and a JD from the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, where he was an editor for the Brigham Young University Law Review. He currently serves as adjunct professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. He has been in private practice since 1988 and has developed various businesses, including a manufacturing company and national watch company. He has written and spoken widely on Joseph Smith’s legal affairs and is currently preparing a multivolume work on Oliver Cowdery’s legal practice. He is a trustee and treasurer for the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation and the managing editor of Mormon Historical Studies.
John W. Welch
is a consulting scholar for The Joseph Smith Papers. He is the Robert K. Thomas Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, where he teaches nineteenth-century American legal history, biblical law, and various tax courses. He attended BYU (BA in history; MA in Latin and Greek), studied Greek philosophy at Oxford University, and received his law degree from Duke University, where he served as the articles editor for the Duke Law Journal. He practiced law in Los Angeles, where he organized the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS). From 1988 to 1991 he served as one of the editors for Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and since 1991 he has served as the editor-in-chief of BYU Studies, a role that included serving as publisher for the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. He was one of the organizers of the bicentennial conference for Joseph Smith at the Library of Congress. For many years he has been the general editor of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. His publications include “Bible in American Law,” in Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties (2006); The Worlds of Joseph Smith: A Bicentennial Conference at the Library of Congress (2006); Opening the Heavens (2005); the Journals of William E. McLellin (1994); and many other books and articles about Latter-day Saint scriptures.
David J.
Whittaker
is coeditor of volume one of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers. He is curator of nineteenth-century western and Mormon manuscripts, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library; and associate professor of history, Brigham Young University. He holds a PhD in American history (BYU) and has authored or coauthored five books and about fifty articles in Mormon history. He was a Frederick W. Beinecke Fellow in western Americana, at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, 1990; and held a Senior Scholar, William F. Fulbright Fellowship, David and Mary Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London, 1993–1994. He served as president of the Mormon History Association from 1995 to 1996. He served as an area director and institute director for the Church Educational System of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in southern California from 1970 to 1976 and has been the academic director of eight BYU London Study Abroad programs.
David L.
Willden
serves as the program manager of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. His career includes work as a senior advisor to the federal government, vice president of international consulting firms, and founder of businesses. His specialties are in the areas of strategy, turnarounds, and technology. He has an MBA from The Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Brigham Young University.
Robert J.
Woodford
is coeditor of volumes in the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers and coedited volume one of the Revelations and Translations series (published 2009). He holds a PhD degree from Brigham Young University in Bible and modern scripture and wrote the dissertation “The Historical Development of the Doctrine and Covenants.” He has taught the Doctrine and Covenants and LDS church history for over forty years, particularly at the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, LDS Business College, and the Joseph Smith Academy at Nauvoo, Illinois. Concurrently, he taught at BYU Salt Lake Center for over twenty-five years and at the BYU Provo campus for two years. He has authored several articles for the Ensign, BYU Studies, and other publications.
