Redd Center Mission Statement

Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor in Western American History Endowed Chair

Prominent Utah ranchers and philanthropists Charles and Annaley Redd established the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor in Western American History Endowed Chair in 1972 to promote and honor research, publication, and teaching in western American history. They named the chair in honor of Charlie Redd’s father, who settled and developed Latter-day Saint communities in southeastern Utah’s red rock desert, forests, and mountains and established a successful livestock empire. Charlie described his father as “a man who lived a big life,” a somewhat lonely and enigmatic character with “many admirers, who regarded him as a giant.”

Current Redd Chair

Brian Q. Cannon

Brian Q. Cannon graduated from BYU with a BA in American Studies in 1984. He completed an MA in History at Utah State University in 1986 and a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. Since that time, he has been teaching at BYU. He teaches upper division courses in the American West in the Twentieth Century, Utah History, and US History from 1890 to 1945. Much of his research focuses upon agricultural settlement, rural community development and federal rural policy in the twentieth century. Cannon has received fellowships or other awards from the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. He has previously served as chair for the BYU Department of History and director of the Charles Redd Center. Cannon and his wife, Anna Lea, are the parents of one daughter and three sons.

Former Redd Chair Holders

Ignacio Garcia

Ignacio M. García was a faculty member of the Department of History at BYU from 1995 to 2025. A nationally recognized and respected scholar, he is the author of seven books focusing on Mexican American studies, Latino/a/x history, politics, civil rights, and sports. Two of those books have received commendations. He is also the author of numerous articles, essays, book chapters, and most recently, works on Latino Latter-day Saints, domestically and internationally. He has received numerous awards and recognitions, with the two most recent being the 2019 James V. Mink Oral History Award and the 2020 Hickman Diversity Lecture Award.

García served as president of the Mormon History Association from 2019 to ⁠2020 and currently serves on the boards of BYU Studies, the Global Mormon Studies Association, and several other international journals. He is a founding member of the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences’ Diversity, Collaboration, and Inclusion Committee and served as the committee’s chair.

Born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and raised on the west side of San Antonio, Texas, García showed an early passion for writing history that could change the life of his community and the nation. As a young activist for civil rights, he helped organize clubs, labor associations, political entities, and even community newspapers.

He served in Vietnam from 1971 to 1972, where he ran an army dispensary in the Mekong Delta and participated in several mercy missions to villages not serviced by any medical facility. In an interview with The Church News, he said, “The war in Vietnam taught me much about my abilities to be compassionate, understanding of others, and to make tough and unpopular decisions.”

García received a BA in Journalism and Theater from Texas A&I University in 1976, then worked for several years as a journalist covering current events and heading the religion beat. He also had a short stint as a correspondent for the Tucson Citizen, covering the civil war in El Salvador. Later, as an independent reporter, he travelled to Lebanon to write about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). He went back to school and received his MA and PhD in history from the University of Arizona. Two of his books are optioned for feature films.

Thomas G. Alexander

Thomas G. Alexander served as BYU faculty from 1964 to 2004, and he taught at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Southern Illinos University in Carbondale, the University of california at Berkerley, the University of Utah, and Utah State University. He is an author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-six books and monographs and one hundred fifty articles. He specializes in Utah History, Western History, Environmental History, and Mormon History.

He was born in Logan, Utah, on August 8, 1935, and attended the public schools of Ogden, Utah. He earned an associate of science degree from Weber State University in 1955, bachelors and masters degrees at Utah State University in 1960 and 1961, and a Ph.D. in American History at the University of California at Berkeley in 1965.

Tom has been awarded a number of prizes and honors. These include the David and Beatrice Evans Biography Award for Things in Heaven and Earth, the Mormon History Association Best Book Award (twice) for Mormonism in Transition and Things in Heaven and Earth, the Mormon History Association Best Article Award (thrice), the Utah State Historical Society Best Article Award (twice), the Daughters of the American Revolution History Medal Award, the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History, and the Western History Association Award of Merit and Honorary Life Membership.

He is a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society and the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. He has served as president of Phi Alpha Theta, the American Historical Association—Pacific Coast Branch, the Mormon History Association, the Utah Valley Historical Society, and the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. He is president-elect of the national organization of the Sons of Utah Pioneers. He has served as chair of the Utah Humanitites Council, the Utah State Historical Society, and the provo City Landmarks Commission. He served as parliamentarian of the Western History Association and has served as a member of the WHA council. He has served on committees for the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Environment History.

He and his wife, Marilyn John Alexander, live in Provo. He is active in community and church service. He has served as a neighborhood chairman, as a bishop, in three bishoprics, as a High Priests group leader, and in a number of other positions in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and his wife served in mission in Berlin, Germany, in 2004 and 2005 and in the Family and Church History Mission in Salt Lake city, Utah, in 2005. He currently serves as president of the Sunday School in his congregation. He and his wife have five grandchildren and six grand children.

James B. Allen

James B. Allen was born in Ogden, Utah, on June 14, 1927. His family lived in Coalville and Salt Lake City, Utah, and in Star Valley, Wyoming. When he was eleven they moved to Logan, Utah. James received his bachelor's degree in history from Utah State University in 1954, his master's degree from BYU in 1956, and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California in 1963. He began his professional career in the LDS Church Education System in 1954. He was a seminary teacher, seminary coordinator, institute teacher, and Director of the Institutes of Religion in Long Beach and San Bernardino, California. In 1963 he became a member of the Church History faculty at Brigham Young University, and the following year he joined the History department. In 1972 he was appointed Assistant Church Historian, working with newly-appointed Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington. For the next seven years, James spent half his time in that capacity and the other half at BYU. He returned full-time to BYU in 1979 and served as chairman of the History department from 1981 to 1987, when he was appointed to the Lemuel Hardison Redd Chair. He held this appointment until his retirement in 1992.

Throughout his career, Professor Allen has authored, co-authored, and co-edited fourteen books and monographs, around ninety articles mostly related to LDS Church History, and numerous book reviews in professional journals. He has received several prizes and awards for his work including the David Woolley Evans and Beatrice Cannon Evans Biography Award in 1986 for Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton, a Mormon (re-published in 2002 as No Toil nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton). He was named BYU's Distinguished Faculty Lecturer in 1984, and in 1988 he was named a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society.

Among Professor Allen's most well-known books are The Story of the Latter-day Saints (with Glen M. Leonard, Deseret Book Company 2nd edition, 1992) and Men with a Mission: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the British Isles, 1837–1941 (with Ronald K. Esplin and David J. Whittaker, Deseret Book Company, 1992). He was also the major author-compiler of Studies in Mormon History, 1830–1997: An Indexed Bibliography (with Ronald W. Walker and David J. Whittaker, University of Illinois Press, 2000). This remarkable bibliography, which took over sixteen years to compile, was heralded by the Mormon History Association, as well as by historians generally, as the most valuable tool yet to appear for students of LDS History. J. Michael Hunter, of the BYU library, continues to update the bibliography database, which is now online at http://mormonhistory.byu.edu.

Professor Allen was married to the former Renée Jones.

Leonard J. Arrington

Leonard J. Arrington was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, on July 2, 1917. He grew up in an active Latter-day Saint farming household and planned an agricultural career. He attended the University of Idaho, where he studied agricultural science and then later switched to agricultural economics. He completed a PhD in Economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1952. Trained as an economic historian, Arrington eventually expanded his research into many aspects of history. His revised dissertation, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 was published by Harvard University Press in 1958 and has been a standard for Mormon and Western American economic history. Arrington taught at Utah State University until 1973, when he became the first holder of the Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Chair of Western History, and the first director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. At the same time he was called as historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Arrington continued as the Redd Center director until his Church History division at the LDS Church Headquarters was transferred to BYU. He then became the director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. He held the Redd Chair until his retirement in 1982. In that capacity he served as mentor for for many practitioners of the New Mormon History.

Current Director

Photo by fhss creative media

Jay H. Buckley

Jay Harry Buckley was born in Evanston, Wyoming, to Jack H and Carol Joy (Wirig) Buckley on November 3, 1969. The youngest of six children, Buckley grew up on a cattle and sheep ranch in Lyman, Wyoming. His family also owned another ranch straddling the Utah–Wyoming border along the north slope of the Uinta Mountains near Lonetree, Wyoming. The original homesteader, George Bullock, was good friends with Butch Cassidy, who often stayed at the ranch.

Beaver Creek of Henry’s Fork (Green River) flows through the Buckley Lonetree ranch only a dozen miles from the first Rocky Mountain fur trade rendezvous site in 1825. Meanwhile, the Buckley Bridger Valley ranch lies just a few miles downstream from the Fort Bridger State Historic Site. Both ranch locations inspired Jay’s interest in the American West, American Indians, and the mountain man and rendezvous era.

Buckley began attending BYU in 1988. He served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the South Africa Cape Town Mission from 1989 to 1991, during South African President F.W. de Klerk’s ending of South Africa’s apartheid policies. Buckley was living among and teaching the restored gospel to Nelson Mandela’s Xhosa-speaking Thembu Nation in Umtata (Mthatha) when President de Klerk released Mandela from prison on February 11, 1990. Both de Klerk and his subsequent successor, Mandela, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Upon completing his mission, Buckley returned to BYU in 1991, and two significant events happened. First, he met Rebecca “Becky” Daynes, and they were married in the Salt Lake Temple in 1992. They are the parents of three children, David, Mary, and Jared. Second, Buckley enrolled in two history courses taught by Professor Fred R. Gowans covering the American West and American Indians. After taking these courses, Buckley declared history as his major and graduated with a BA in history in 1994. With Gowans as his mentor, Buckley wrote his master’s thesis on mountain man Robert Campbell and received his MA in history from BYU in 1996.

Buckley enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and studied with renowned Lewis and Clark expert Gary E. Moulton, editor of The Journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition. Working as a research assistant to John R. Wunder, director of the Center for Great Plains Studies, Buckley completed his coursework at the Lincoln campus. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Nebraska Wesleyan University both hired him as an adjunct history instructor while he completed his dissertation on Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Clark, which won the Lewis E. Atherton Dissertation Prize from the State Historical Society of Missouri in 2001.

Upon his graduation in 2001, BYU’s history department hired Buckley in the fall semester of 2001 to replace the retiring Gowans. Buckley returned to Provo, Utah, in the fall of 2001 and began teaching courses in American West, American Indian, and US history. He revised his award-winning dissertation into William Clark: Indian Diplomat (2008), which received the Missouri History Book Award for best Missouri biography from the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Eagleton–Waters Book Award for the best book on Missouri political history. BYU promoted him to associate professor of history in 2008.

The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center and the Portage Route Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation selected Buckley as a Scholar-in-Residence at Great Falls, Montana, in 2004 during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. The national Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation awarded Buckley a Meritorious Achievement Award for his Lewis and Clark scholarship in 2010. The membership of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation elected Buckley to their board of directors in 2006 and Buckley served as national president from 2011 to 2012. The foundation provides leadership on scholarship, education, and conservation pertaining to the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Superintendent Mark Weekley presented Buckley with the National Park Service’s distinguished merit medallion for his exemplary service in 2012. In 2018, Buckley delivered the inaugural Gary E. Moulton Lecture at the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. He continues to serve on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal We Proceeded On.

Buckley directs college-credit field studies every summer for the Driven2Teach Program (driven2teach.org), which offers Utah educators grades 4–12 who specialize in American History a hands-on learning experience at historical sites around the country. History department chair Don Harreld selected Buckley to receive the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2015. He has been a visiting scholar for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History since 2018. In addition to teaching history courses, Buckley has also directed the American Indian Studies minor at BYU since 2001.

BYU’s Redd Center selected Buckley as their Mollie and Karl G. Butler Young Scholar in Western Studies (2006–08). Redd Center Director Brian Q. Cannon invited Buckley to join the Redd Center board of directors in 2012. Benjamin M. Ogles, dean of the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, appointed Buckley director of the Redd Center in 2018, replacing Brian Q. Cannon, who had accepted a new position as history department chair. Buckley’s first term as Redd Center director began September 1, 2018.

Current Associate Director

Brenden W. Rensink

Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. His monograph, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Connecting the Greater West Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book from the Western Writers of America. His co-edited anthology, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (University of Utah Press, 2019), won the 2019 Metcalfe Best Anthology Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association. In 2022, Rensink published the edited collection, The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). Rensink is also co-editor of Documents Vol. 4, and Documents Vol. 6 of the award-winning Joseph Smith Papers project (Church Historians Press, 2016, 2017), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink helps manage events, programming, awards, and research at the BYU Redd Center. He created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. He is currently working on projects on transnational Indigenous histories and Western environmental history, and is founding editor of the new “The American West in Context” series with the University of New Mexico Press. Prof. Rensink can be found online at www.bwrensink.org or https://linktr.ee/bwrensink.

Former Directors

Brian Q. Cannon

Brian Q. Cannon served as director of the Charles Redd Center from January 2003 to August 2018. Cannon earned his BA in American Studies at BYU, his MA in History at Utah State University, and his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He accepted an assistant professor position in BYU’s history department in 1992.

Cannon’s early research focused upon American land policy, reclamation, and agricultural settlement, resulting in his first two books—Remaking the Agrarian Dream: Rural Resettlement in the Mountain West and Reopening the Frontier: Homesteading in the Modern West. His study of Utah and Latter-day Saint history resulted in a third book coauthored with Charles S. Peterson, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945, which received an Award of Merit from the Utah State Historical Society. He authored dozens of book chapters and articles on topics including New Deal farm labor camps for Dust Bowl refugees, Great Depression–era documentary photography, reclamation of arid lands, the origins of the Church Welfare Plan, Indian voting rights, and American Indian indentured servitude. With help from Associate Director Embry, Director Cannon organized topical research seminars at BYU where scholars from institutions across the state and nation visited the Redd Center to workshop papers on common themes with the intent of preparing those papers for publication in topical volumes. These workshops resulted in six volumes prepared during Cannon’s tenure, two of which were coedited by Cannon and Embry—Utah in the Twentieth Century and Immigrants in the Far West: Historical Identities and Experiences—and one of which was co-edited with Clyde A. Milner II—Reconstruction and Mormon America.

By the early twenty-first century, when Cannon became Redd Center director, effective fundraising and endowment campaigns by previous directors and conservative budgeting had produced substantial cash reserves and a consistent stream of revenue, allowing the center to expand support for scholarship and public programming. During Cannon’s tenure as director, the center inaugurated a visiting scholar program, enabling researchers to visit BYU to engage in extended research, writing over a term or semester, and increasing the center’s professional footprint. The center’s support of prizes and lectures for professional associations increased considerably, as did the number of research grants awarded each year.

The center expanded its support of state history day to states across the Intermountain West and cooperated with the Western History Association and the Western Literature Association in sponsoring scholarships to enable K–12 teachers to participate in those associations’ annual conferences. The center also increased programming and research support on campus, expanded the frequency of lectures, instituted prizes for student papers and posters, offered interdisciplinary faculty research grants, and established the Mollie and Karl Butler Young Scholar Award.

Redd Center board member John Murphy was instrumental in helping Cannon establish the Charles Redd Fellowships which enabled scholars to conduct research for several weeks in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library. The center also instituted semiannual lunch gatherings for western studies faculty to promote interdisciplinary collegiality and provide a forum for faculty to present their research. During Cannon’s tenure, the center’s oral history program produced hundreds of oral history interviews under Associate Director Jessie Embry on topics ranging from Latter-day Saint sports and recreation to the Indian Student Placement Program, along with articles and monographs based on those interviews. In Cannon’s final years as director, Assistant Director Brenden Rensink brought the center into the digital age, broadcasting lectures in real time to audiences beyond campus and creating Intermountain Histories, a mobile- and web-based public history app that published student-created content on western historic sites.

In 2019, following his service at the Redd Center, Cannon was named the Neil L. York Professor of History and appointed chair of the BYU history department. He served in a variety of professional associations including as president of both the Agricultural History Society and the Mormon History Association and on the editorial boards of Agricultural History, BYU Studies, and the Utah Historical Quarterly. In 2020, he received the Gordon Bakken Award of Merit from the Western History Association in recognition of his service to the field of western history and to the association; that service largely resulted from his ability to support western history as Redd Center director.

Edward A. Geary

Edward Acord Geary is a product of Utah’s “arid quarter”—the ragged horizons and abrupt canyons, the long views, crystalline light, and dry tang of the air on the Colorado Plateau—where he was born in 1937. Geary grew up in the town of Huntington in a close-knit neighborhood with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins near at hand. He is descended from a long line of taciturn Edward Gearys, reaching back to the English Midlands and filling a section of the churchyard at Thornton, Leicestershire. His middle name came from a maternal great-uncle who starred in numerous B-grade silent Westerns and was memorialized by John Wayne as “the toughest SOB” of all the Hollywood cowboys. Geary grew up on family stories and developed early the fascination with connections in place and time that are the subject matter of most of his published work.

After graduating from North Emery High School in 1956, Geary attended Carbon College, in Price, where his father taught speech and drama, then went to BYU where he earned BA and MA degrees in English in 1960 and 1963. He completed a PhD in English Literature at Stanford University in 1971. He joined the BYU English department in 1968 and continued until his retirement in 2006, serving terms as graduate coordinator, associate chair, and department chair. He served as editor of BYU Studies (1983–91), associate dean of the College of Humanities (1993–97), and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies (1997–2003). He also served on the Board of Directors of the Utah Arts Council (1985–93) and chaired the Utah Centennial County History Council (1992–96). In retirement, he is a member of the Emery County Public Lands Council (2009–) and chairs the Emery County Historic Preservation Commission (2012–). He has been on the National Board for the Evans Biography Award since 2001.

In addition to articles in literary history and criticism in British, American, and Mormon regional literature, Geary has published three books with a regional emphasis: Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood (1992), The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateaus of Utah (1992), and A History of Emery County (1996). He was honored with the Charles Redd Humanities Prize of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters (1994); the Morris S. Rosenblatt Award (1985) and the Dale L. Morgan Award (1999) from the Utah Historical Quarterly; and a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History (1994).

William A. Wilson

William Albert ”Bert” Wilson was born on September 23, 1933, in Tremonton, Utah, to Bill and Lucile Williams Wilson and raised in the small town of Downey, Idaho. Wilson admired his father’s work ethic. He also inherited his mother’s storytelling talent, which he developed throughout his life. Nevertheless, during his high school years he was an unassuming student who rarely cracked a book and spent his time before and after school performing manual labor for local farmers, businesses, and the railroad. Any hours devoted to schooling often ended in mischief rather than study.[i]

That all began to change when Wilson went to college. He was the first in his family to attend university and his worldview expanded exponentially when he began studying political science and Russian at BYU. He took a break in his studies to serve a three-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Finland where he fell in love with the Finnish people and Hannele Blomqvist, a convert of one year who was serving a mission in her own country. After their missions, Bert and Hannele married in the Salt Lake Temple and later had four children together. Attending BYU combined his thrill of intellectual inquiry with his knack at storytelling; nothing made Wilson feel more alive than rigorous academic work. Wilson abandoned his dreams of serving the nation as a super-spy in favor of following his love of words and stories. He switched his major to English and American Literature. He subsequently received an MA in English from BYU.[ii]

Eventually, Wilson grew tired of the idea that only educated people could craft good stories and sought a more inclusive discipline. He found his niche at the Indiana University (IU) Folklore Institute where he earned a PhD in Folklore.[iii] The “damned dissertation,” as it was known in the family, was a nine-year project that would take Bert, Hannele, and their children from Indiana to Finland and then back to Provo, but they reveled in the distinctive cultural experiences of each place. His PhD research focused upon the folk culture of Finland; specifically, how the Kalevala was politicized as a tool for instilling nationalism.[iv] During his time at IU, Wilson also collected word of mouth stories about the Three Nephites. Colleagues were astounded that he could collect Latter-day Saint folklore outside of Utah.[v]

Wilson’s study of folklore helped him gain an understanding about many different cultures, but his later research into Latter-day Saint and western culture would provide him with a greater appreciation of his own. He went on to expand his initial research into Latter-day Saint culture to include everyday topics, and his studies have been instrumental in helping those outside the Church understand its surrounding culture.[vi] The natural expansion from Mormon studies to western studies occurred when he spent the summer of 1978 documenting ranch life and culture in Paradise Valley, Nevada, for the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.[vii]

In the mid-1980s, Wilson developed a vibrant folklore program and accompanying archive at Utah State University and began directing the Fife Folklore Conference. In 1984, he returned to BYU to build its folklore archive. Both collections began with papers students wrote about legends, beliefs, jokes, songs, and popular culture with Latter-day Saints or in the Intermountain West.[viii] Wilson felt it was important to advocate for folklore as a field worth supporting and funding, as many university professors had a hard time believing that the stories, jokes, and traditions produced in the present could merit the same scholarship as works of art from the past.[ix]

Wilson taught as a professor of folklore and Scandinavian studies and chaired the English department. After “surviving” six years as the English department director, he was asked to direct the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and also became editor of Western Folklore.[x] He worked to demonstrate a better concept of what it meant to be a Westerner, what it meant to grow up in the West, and what life in the West was like.[xi] He approached editing Western Folklore with the goal that any articles accepted needed to be accessible to average university students.[xii] Wilson believed that oral histories were the enduring contribution of the Charles Redd Center and was filled with a passionate desire to research the folklore of the geography and culture that produced him.[xiii] He died on April 25, 2016, in Provo, Utah, after an extended illness.

Thomas G. Alexander

Thomas G. Alexander is a Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor Emeritus of Western American History at BYU. Born in Logan, Utah, in 1935, the son of Glen M. Alexander and Violet Bird, he grew up in Ogden and attended public school there. He earned an associate of science degree from Weber College (1955), bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Utah State University (1960, 1961), and a PhD in American history from the University of California, Berkeley (1965). In 1959, he married Marilyn Johns of Ogden. They live in Provo and are the parents of five children and six grandchildren.

The BYU Department of History hired Alexander in 1964, and he continued his illustrious career there until his retirement in 2004. Previous to that he taught at the University of Nebraska at Kearney; Southern Illinois University Carbondale; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; and Utah State University. Alexander served as assistant director, associate director, and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies (1972–1992) and currently serves as a board member. Alexander is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-seven books and monographs, more than 150 articles, and numerous reviews. He specializes in Utah history, Western history, American Environmental history, and Mormon history.

Some of his books include: A Clash of Interests: Interior Department and Mountain West, 1863–1896 (1977); Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (1985) (with James B. Allen); The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vol 5 (Asst. Ed., 1974); Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (1986, 2nd ed. 1996; 3^rd ed. 2012); Things in Heaven and Earth, the Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, A Mormon Prophet (1991, 2nd ed 1993); Utah, the Right Place: The Official Centennial History (1995, 2nd ed, 1996, 3^rd ed. revised, 2003); Grace and Grandeur: A History of Salt Lake City (2002); Historical Dictionary of Mormonism (4^th ed, 2019) (with Davis Bitton); Edward Hunter Snow, Pioneer, Educator, Statesman (2012); and Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith (2019).

Alexander has won numerous prizes, including the David and Beatrice Evans Biography Award for Things in Heaven and Earth, the Mormon History Association Best Book Award for Mormonism in Transition and Things in Heaven and Earth, the Mormon History Association Best Article Award (three times), the Utah State Historical Society Best Article Award (twice), the Daughters of the American Revolution History Medal Award, the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History, Phi Kappa Phi Emeritus Life Member, the Western History Association Award of Merit and Honorary Life Membership, and the Mormon History Association’s Grace Arrington Award for Historical Excellence. He is a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society and the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. At BYU he earned the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lectureship, the university’s highest honor for a faculty member.

Professor Alexander has served as president of Phi Alpha Theta (the history national honor society); the American Historical Association—Pacific Coast Branch; the Mormon History Association; the Utah Valley Historical Society; the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters; and the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers. He has served as chair of the Utah Humanities Council, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Provo City Landmarks Commission—along with committees for the Western History Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Society for Environmental History. Currently, he serves as parliamentarian of the Western History Association and has served as a member of the Western History Association council.

Active in his community and church, Alexander has also served as a Provo City neighborhood chair, as a member of the Provo City Landmarks Commission, and as a member of the Utah State Capitol Arts Placement Commission. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he has served as a bishop, a branch president, a counselor in three other bishoprics, a stake high counselor, a stake and ward executive secretary, an elders quorum president, a high priests group leader, a Sunday school teacher, and in numerous other positions. He served a Latter-day Saint mission in the West German Mission (1956–1958), and he and his wife served missions in Berlin, Germany, (2004–2005) and in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City (2005). He currently serves as ward historian and as a Sunday school teacher.

Leonard J. Arrington

Leonard James Arrington was born on July 2, 1917, to Noah W. and Edna Corn Arrington in Twin Falls, Idaho.[i] The third of eleven children, he was raised on a twenty-acre family farm that was a model of self-sufficiency. Arrington’s father used a hand plow pulled by a horse or mule, and his mother scrubbed laundry by hand on an old washboard. On the farm, Arrington was responsible for driving the team, weeding, irrigating, and assisting with the harvest. He also got along well with the animals and cared for cows, horses, and his prize-winning Rhode Island Red chickens.[ii] Although schooling was considered secondary to working the farm and completing chores, Arrington’s father drove the children to school each morning in the sheep wagon, and Arrington actively participated in the Future Farmers of America (FFA) and the Boy Scouts of America.[iii]

This academic support, however, did not extend to Arrington’s educational aspirations at the University of Idaho at Moscow. Arrington’s father tried to stress the importance of serving a mission to distract him from his studies in hopes that he would return to the family farm. His father was ambivalent enough about Arrington’s studies that he refused to provide financial support for college but offered to pay for a mission. In the end, Arrington did not serve a mission, and he paid for his own education with scholarships and part-time jobs. His academic credentials and achievements as a state and national officer in the FFA earned him a scholarship at the University of Idaho. Arrington began his undergraduate studies in agriculture but switched after just one year to major in economics with minors in political science, history, and English literature. His coursework in the liberal arts expanded his worldview immensely and propelled him on to graduate school and an academic career. Despite the familial standoff between spiritual and secular learning, Arrington saw no disharmony between science and religion or his studies of secular and sacred thought.[iv] After graduation, he pursued a doctorate in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While pursuing his doctorate and working in Raleigh as a teacher, Arrington met Grace Fort, a lovely Presbyterian girl. The US army drafted Arrington in March 1943 during World War II. He was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but received permission for a leave to meet Grace. Arrington arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the two of them were married on April 24, 1943, followed by a twenty-four hour honeymoon before he reported back to Fort Bragg.[v] His first assignment was to a POW camp confinement center in North Africa where he processed Italian prisoners.

During this time, he read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and, upon reflection, had a profoundly spiritual experience. Arrington received an impression that his calling in life was to engage in speaking and writing and use words as “heavenly messengers” and he vowed then and there to become a teacher and a writer about religion and economics. Later, Arrington was transferred to an assignment in Italy, where he quickly put his knowledge and skills in the field of economics to use working with economic reconstruction agencies. He also used the time abroad to learn Italian and acquired a proficient level of fluency.[vi] After his discharge in 1945, Arrington worked to finish the doctoral program the war had disrupted, and his completed dissertation became the basis for his seminal work Great Basin Kingdom, a deeply profound work on Latter-day Saint and Utah history.[vii]

During his doctoral work, Arrington accepted a position at Utah State Agricultural College (present-day Utah State University) and moved his family to Logan, Utah, where he and Grace had three children together and Grace was baptized as a member of the Church. Arrington’s tenure at Utah State lasted until his appointment as Church Historian in 1972.[viii] Arrington helped establish the Mormon History Association in 1965 and served as its inaugural president from 1966–67. He desired a place where potentially controversial topics could be discussed. He supported publishing articles in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He helped establish the Western History Association and was elected president in 1968–69, was president of the Agricultural History Society in 1969–70 and as president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association in 1981–82. Among his other publishing accomplishments, Arrington was hired as Editor-in-Chief of the Western Historical Quarterly.[ix] The family also took a brief sojourn to Italy where Arrington lectured in Italian on a Fulbright teaching fellowship.[x] Then, in the early 1970s, Elder Howard W. Hunter formed a committee to reorganize and professionalize the position of Church Historian. These structural changes led to the foundation of the Church History Department and in 1972, Arrington was offered the position of Church Historian.[xi] Simultaneously, he employed his knowledge of western studies as the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor of Western American History and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU.[xii] Thomas G. Alexander served as associate director of the Redd Center and ran the day-to-day operations, although he consulted with Arrington on major decisions.

In 1980, Latter-day Saint church leaders transferred the History Division—the primary writing branch of the Church Historical Department—to the BYU campus. The new center was renamed the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. The Smith Institute assumed the responsibility of writing and publishing church history for members worldwide. Arrington continued as director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History until his retirement in 1987. The leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released Arrington as Church Historian and director of the History Division in February 1982 but the change was not even announced in April’s General Conference.[xiii] Compounding this dramatic career change, on March 10, 1982, his wife of thirty-nine years of marriage—Grace Fort—who served as a pillar of resiliency and strength in his life, passed away of heart disease. The following year, on November 19, 1983, Arrington married Harriet Anne Horne.[xiv] Upon retirement, he continued to publish, producing a history of Idaho as well as several other histories and biographies.[xv] Eighty-one year old Arrington died in his home in Salt Lake City on February 11, 1999, from complications due to diabetes and heart problems. Arrington donated his personal papers to Utah State University and microfilms of his pre-1982 diaries to the Church Archives. The Arrington Papers at USU’s Merrill-Crazier Library are extensive and represent one of the most significant archival sources on twentieth-century Mormon history.

Former Associate Directors

Jessie Embry

Jessie L. Embry was born in Logan, Utah, in 1952, the fourth child of Anna E. C. and Bertis L. Embry. She grew up in North Logan and attended Cache County schools. Her parents believed that travel was an important part of education. The family went “around the world” on the way to and from Iran.

After graduating from Sky View High School in 1970, Embry attended BYU, where she received a BA and MA in American History. She took an oral history course as a graduate student that influenced her professional career. She served a Latter-day Saint mission to the Canada Halifax Mission from 1974 to 1976, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies hired her in 1979 as the oral history program director. Over the years, the Redd Center directors expanded her title to assistant and associate director. During her thirty-five years at the Redd Center, Embry expanded the oral history program to include not only a collection of interviews but also publications based on those interviews. With the support of Redd Center directors, she started programs in historic preservation, western studies, publication assistance to presses, and award programs to students and faculty at BYU.

Embry wrote or edited seventeen books and published over one hundred articles. Her books on Latter-day Saint polygamy, Latter-day Saint African Americans and other ethnic groups, and community and ward histories have been groundbreaking studies in those fields and opened additional research in those areas. She also taught Utah history; specialized classes in sports; ethnic, community, and religious history; the senior seminar class; historiography classes for the history department; and church history in the twentieth century for the Church History Department. Some of her students have become leaders in the Latter-day Saint studies movement.

Embry volunteered as executive secretary of the Mormon History Association for two four-year terms. She served on boards and as president of the John Whitmer Historical Association, as president of the Utah Women’s History Association, and on committees for the Western History Association and the Oral History Association. She was a member of the Provo City Landmarks Commission and served as a docent at the Church History Museum for twenty-five years. In 2004, The Mormon History Association honored her with the Leonard J. Arrington Award for a Distinctive Contribution to the Cause of Mormon History. The Utah Humanities named her a friend of the Humanities in 2002, and the Utah State Historical Society listed as a fellow for a distinguished career of research, writing, and service in the field of history in 2018.

Jessie saw her connection with the center as more than a job. She donated her royalties for her book, payment for writing the Wasatch County history, and honorariums for lectures to the Redd Center. She also promoted the center by publishing her books on Latter-day Saint ethnic groups through the center.

In 2014, Embry retired from the Redd Center. She has continued to actively participate in historical research and editing by volunteering as the editor of the Journal of Mormon History and as a research assistant for the historic sites division in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.