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Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History

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Description

Among historians of Utah and the American West, few names have greater resonance than Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Every of these writers made enduring contributions not only to our knowledge of the American West but also to our view of the region and its history. In many ways their writing set the usual for scholarship and interpretation, and their influence is still felt nowadays.

Yet they were not flawless. As Gary Topping explains on this, the first comprehensive appraisal of their work, Every had serious shortcomings. DeVoto and Stegner, master storytellers, distorted their histories with over the top use of literary and artistic techniques; Morgan, the thorough researcher, failed to see larger contexts and interpretive possibilities; Brooks, courageous in finding damning new information at the Mountain Meadows massacre, stopped short of drawing conclusions that might alienate her from her fellow Mormons; and Brodie, psychobiographer extraordinaire, nonetheless succumbed to reading too much into the lives of her subjects in line with her own emotions and conflicts.

All five writers experienced Mormon Utah in the formative stages of their lives and, whether they wanted to or not, fashioned their work at the American West under that indelible influence. Topping shows in the end how, regardless of weaknesses, Every created exemplary models of diligent research and narrative elegance even as establishing new traditions in western historical scholarship.



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