Noted historian is 2006 Arrington Lecture speaker at USU

The 2006 Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture at Utah State University features noted historian Thomas G. Alexander, the Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Western American History at Brigham Young University. The lecture, presented by Special Collections and Archives in the Merrill-Cazier Library at USU, is offered in conjunction with the Arrington Archives that is housed at USU.

Alexander’s lecture, “Brigham Young, the Council of the Twelve, and the Latter-day Saint Investigation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” is Sept. 21, 7 p.m., at the Logan LDS Tabernacle, 50 North Main. The lecture is free and all are invited.

Alexander 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.

USU’s Merrill-Cazier Library houses 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.

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