Dale Morgan
Encyclopedia
Lowell Dale Morgan generally cited as Dale Morgan or Dale L. Morgan, was an American historian
, accomplished researcher, biographer, editor, and critic. He specialized in material on Utah
history, Mormon history, the American fur trade
, and overland trails. His work is known both for its comprehensive research and accuracy and for the fluid imagery of his prose.
Morgan was forced by post-lingual deafness as an early teen to communicate by letters throughout his professional life. This effort created a written network for scholars interested in Western American themes. Vast stores of correspondence indicate his willingness to help another writer or scholar, to provide information on sources and materials, or offer advice on projects. Many emerging scholars, particularly those out of the academic mainstream, considered him a mentor. As a result, Morgan stood in the center of a scholarly group of literary figures of the 1930s through 1960s involved in history and biography of the American West. These individuals included Juanita Brooks
, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto
, Charles Kelly
, J. Roderic Korns
, A. Russell Mortensen, William Mulder, and Harold Schindler
.
in 1914 and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the city. He was the oldest of the four children of James Lowell Morgan and Emily Holmes. His father, James Morgan died of appendicitis
when Dale Morgan was only five years old. To raise her children, Emily Morgan returned to college to upgrade her normal certificate to a college degree and worked until her retirement as an elementary school teacher.
A promising and intelligent youth, Morgan contracted meningitis in August 1929. The disease left him with a total loss of hearing. Emily Morgan kept him home from school for an entire year, hoping that some hearing would return. Deafness cut off his ability to relate to people around him. The once popular, social, and athletic boy became socially introverted, devoting much of his time to reading and study. Morgan recalled that he had not yet reconciled himself to his deafness by the time he returned to school. In 1951, in a letter to Marguerite Sinclair Reusser, he wrote that a minor family crisis in March 1931 led to a hysterical outburst. During this emotional time, Morgan finally confided in his mother the difficulties and fears he had faced over the loss of his hearing. I began to face the future instead of wasting myself in bitter regret over a past that was beyond my reach. That was the beginning of my adjustment to the fact that my hearing was gone and would probably never return. (p. 116) At this time, he began a lifelong pattern of writing, producing thousands of careful transcriptions, personal letters, and books in his field.
Morgan learned and became quite competent in lip reading, but was never comfortable with the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the method. His friends noted that he could speak quite clearly but typically chose not to do so unless among people he knew well. Deafness gave him no way to regulate his voice and his conversation was locked in a high-pitched monotone. Instead he typically turned to communicating in writing, carrying on personal conversations with the use of note cards, the backs of letters, scratch paper, and other handy paper. Archivist and historiographer Gary Topping noted that ...because Morgan’s deafness shifted his communication with the external world entirely to the written world, his world became a literary world, and the long hours of practice with the written world turned him into a virtuosos of English prose in the same way that musical practice produces virtuosity. (p. 118) As an adult his publication manuscripts exhibit heavy revisions and editing, while his letters flow through his manual typewriters and onto paper as seemingly seamless compositions, almost without typographic error.
The advent of the Depression, and Morgan’s deafness, reduced his ability to find employment after graduation from high school. However, an admiring English teacher found college funds for him in a vocational rehabilitation program. From 1933 to 1937, Morgan studied commercial art at the University of Utah
, taking advantage of known talents and a personal interest in drawing and graphic layout. However, he found his personal interests drawn to literary studies and writing. He was a contributor to the student newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, and added to his writing experience by contributing creative work to The Pen, the student literary publication. At college he developed a close association with other students who would be recognized for history and literature. These included future historian Helen Zeese
(later Papanikolas), and Ray Benedict West Jr. Two important relationships were formed with Daily Chronicle editor Richard Scowcroft and faculty advisor Wallace Stegner
. Both men became novelists and operated the respected writing programme at Stanford University.
In these New Deal
relief programs, Morgan honed his skills in research and organization. He acquired a deep understanding of primary source material and information retrieval from his work in the library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Within months, he was a major figure in the survey of state and county records, organizing much of the work and completing the writing of surveys done for state and county archives. By 1940 he was overseeing both programs, and by 1942 had supervised the production of histories of Ogden
and Provo
as well as acting as a primary writer of The WPA Guide To Utah. His work was well received by his superiors in the east and by local historians. Also in 1940, Morgan published the first substantive historical study of the Provisional State of Deseret
in the Utah Historical Quarterly, analyzing primary documents dealing with the State of Deseret
, including the constitution and early ordinances of the state, with a lengthy editorial introduction explaining their context. He also was involved in other writing projects, including the state contribution to a history of grazing in the western U.S. During this time he began exchanging correspondence with two women who would become well-respected writers, Juanita Brooks
and Fawn M. Brodie
. Morgan contributed substantively to the work of each as a mentor, critic, and advocate.
In 1942, unable to serve in the armed forces, Morgan moved to Washington, D.C. and worked in the central office of a war-rime regulatory agency, the Office of Price Administration. While there, his free time was spent using the relatively new National Archives and the Library of Congress
, combing through federal records, reading methodically through hundreds of American newspapers and printed materials. This work netted him large files of typed transcriptions on Mormons, transmississippi Native Americans, the activities of fur traders of the 1820s through 1840s, and exploration. Working in these institutions, Morgan standardized and honed his skill as a researcher.
Morgan had arrived in Washington, D.C. with the idea of eventually producing an authoritative history of early Mormonism. In 1945 he was awarded a post-service Guggenheim Foundation research grant, which he activated in 1947. He left Washington, D.C. and continued his research in New York
and New England as well as along the Mormon Trail
through Ohio
, Missouri
, and Illinois
, and into California
. In late 1947, again in Utah and desperately needing paying work, Morgan agreed to edit the Utah Historical Quarterly, publishing the journals of the John Wesley Powell
expeditions of 1869-72 between 1947 and 1949. Of necessity Morgan acted as an independent historian between 1947 and 1952. During these years, he narrowed his focus to an intended three-volume history of Mormonism, but maintained his interest in the American fur trade and exploration. After leaving Utah again for Washington D.C. in 1949 and the cancellation of his Mormon-book contract in 1952, Morgan turned to other aspects of the American West and produced several authoritative books on the West still regarded as definitive, including Jedediah Smith
and the Opening of the West (1953), and three bibliographies of Mormon sects.
Morgan was retained by the University of California
's Bancroft Library
director George P. Hammond as a researcher for the Hopi-Navajo land claim law suit in 1953. In 1954 an appointment as an editor and research assistant at the Bancroft ended Morgan’s precarious but productive years as an independent writer and pulled him to the West Coast. In California, his work and attention was drawn more fully into overland trail and California history. During his tenure at Bancroft he wrote or edited some forty books including the edited collection of documents in Overland in 1846 (1963) and The West of William H. Ashley (1964), as well as producing well received articles and reviews. He was named a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 1960 and received the Henry Raup Wagner Award in 1961. Morgan received a second Guggenheim fellowship in 1970 to support research toward a history of the American fur trade, which he never began. Morgan died of cancer in 1971 at the age of fifty-six.
Later researchers have benefited from Dale Morgan's painstaking scholarship, extensive collection of correspondence, and reams of transcripts. He was the moving force behind the first unified catalogue of works about Mormonism, which he proposed to the Utah State Historical Society in 1951. Using Morgan's list, which had been re-typed and supplemented as a card file, Brigham Young University
librarian Chad J. Flake completed and published A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930 (1978), with an introduction written by Morgan. Now in a second edition, it remains an indispensable reference work for scholars looking at Mormon history or sociology. Morgan's papers are at the Bancroft Library; most of his research library now forms part of the holdings of L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University
.
The Utah State Historical Society has established the annual "Dale L. Morgan Award," presented to the author of the best scholarly article published in the Utah Historical Quarterly.
, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Morgan’s family actively participated in church activities. Due to his sudden deafness, however, he drifted from the LDS faith and he did not affiliate with any religious organization as an adult. Morgan has been described by others as a "through going atheist". He was profoundly affected by the soft positivism of 1930s social psychology and took a stance in favor of historicism
. Having rejected any religious motive as impossible, Morgan insisted that his work in western history and Mormonism present a completely objective, exclusively naturalistic viewpoint on religious matters, and encouraged other Utah and western historians to follow his example. In 1943, writing to S. A. Burgess, a historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ
), Morgan said that his: "... viewpoint about Mormon history is that of the sociologist, the psychologist, the political, economic, and social historian."
Historian of the Latter Day Saint movement Jan Shipps
credits Morgan, along with three other notable historians - Bernard DeVoto
, Fawn McKay Brodie, and Juanita Brooks
, with establishing a basis for the new historiography of Mormonism through significant Mormon related works in the 1940s and 1950s.
Morgan's intellectual experience in the federal WPA
programs had both advantages and disadvantages for him as a historian. The independent nature of these programs encouraged his critical judgment and work ethic, forced him to work with a variety of people, and exposed him to a wide training ground on source development and research. However, it did not lead him to consider the larger meaning of the facts he gathered or to understand the philosophy and theory of history, as taught in an academic setting. In fact, during the trials of his career, he became quite antagonistic to academic requirements. In response to a negative academic review of a work by his friend DeVoto, he wrote: "...the term ‘history’ had better be redefined to mean, ’a species of writing produced by or enroute to a Ph.D.’ I have had enough troubles trying to break a path alongside this main-traveled road to know something of the snobberies at work here, and the ways in which the academic world and even the world of learning are geared to these attitudes." (p. 130)
According to Topping, this lack of perspective and understanding led Morgan to believe "...that historical facts contain their own meaning, and that the historian’s intellect ought to be active only in internal and external criticism, establishing the authenticity and credibility of sources, yet passive when it came to establishing the larger significance …" (p. 146) As a result, Morgan "...fell short of the interpretive potential of (his) sources...asserting that the facts would somehow convey their own meaning without any help from him…" (p. 6) However the same focus on fact, coupled to a spectacular memory for detail, allowed him to produced work of breathtaking detail and scope within the field. His strength and greatest contribution was as a documentary rather than synthetic historian.
offered a segment on Dale Morgan and Mormon History as part of their annual symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah
. Historian William Mulder, a friend of Morgan, presented the segment.
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, accomplished researcher, biographer, editor, and critic. He specialized in material on Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
history, Mormon history, the American fur trade
Fur trade
The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur. Since the establishment of world market for in the early modern period furs of boreal, polar and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the most valued...
, and overland trails. His work is known both for its comprehensive research and accuracy and for the fluid imagery of his prose.
Morgan was forced by post-lingual deafness as an early teen to communicate by letters throughout his professional life. This effort created a written network for scholars interested in Western American themes. Vast stores of correspondence indicate his willingness to help another writer or scholar, to provide information on sources and materials, or offer advice on projects. Many emerging scholars, particularly those out of the academic mainstream, considered him a mentor. As a result, Morgan stood in the center of a scholarly group of literary figures of the 1930s through 1960s involved in history and biography of the American West. These individuals included Juanita Brooks
Juanita Brooks
Juanita Pulsipher Brooks was an American historian and author, specializing in the American West and Mormon history, including books related to the Mountain Meadows massacre, to which her ancestor Dudley Leavitt was sometimes linked.-Biography:Born Juanita Leone Leavitt, Brooks was born and raised...
, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto
Bernard DeVoto
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.- Life and work :He was born in Ogden, Utah...
, Charles Kelly
Charles Kelly (historian)
Charles Kelly was an American historian of the American west whose work focused on activities in the western salt desert of Utah and Nevada during the pioneer period . Kelly also served as the first superintendent of Capitol Reef National Monument in Southern Utah...
, J. Roderic Korns
J. Roderic Korns
J Roderic "Rod" Korns was a 20th century editor, researcher and historian of the American west. He is best known for West from Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails Across Utah 1846-1850, completed with the assistance of historiographer and author Dale L. Morgan...
, A. Russell Mortensen, William Mulder, and Harold Schindler
Harold Schindler
Harold Moroni "Hal" Schindler was an American journalist and historian, known for his articles and books on the American west...
.
Early life
Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, UtahSalt Lake City, Utah
Salt Lake City is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. The name of the city is often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC. With a population of 186,440 as of the 2010 Census, the city lies in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, which has a total population of 1,124,197...
in 1914 and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the city. He was the oldest of the four children of James Lowell Morgan and Emily Holmes. His father, James Morgan died of appendicitis
Appendicitis
Appendicitis is a condition characterized by inflammation of the appendix. It is classified as a medical emergency and many cases require removal of the inflamed appendix, either by laparotomy or laparoscopy. Untreated, mortality is high, mainly because of the risk of rupture leading to...
when Dale Morgan was only five years old. To raise her children, Emily Morgan returned to college to upgrade her normal certificate to a college degree and worked until her retirement as an elementary school teacher.
A promising and intelligent youth, Morgan contracted meningitis in August 1929. The disease left him with a total loss of hearing. Emily Morgan kept him home from school for an entire year, hoping that some hearing would return. Deafness cut off his ability to relate to people around him. The once popular, social, and athletic boy became socially introverted, devoting much of his time to reading and study. Morgan recalled that he had not yet reconciled himself to his deafness by the time he returned to school. In 1951, in a letter to Marguerite Sinclair Reusser, he wrote that a minor family crisis in March 1931 led to a hysterical outburst. During this emotional time, Morgan finally confided in his mother the difficulties and fears he had faced over the loss of his hearing. I began to face the future instead of wasting myself in bitter regret over a past that was beyond my reach. That was the beginning of my adjustment to the fact that my hearing was gone and would probably never return. (p. 116) At this time, he began a lifelong pattern of writing, producing thousands of careful transcriptions, personal letters, and books in his field.
Morgan learned and became quite competent in lip reading, but was never comfortable with the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the method. His friends noted that he could speak quite clearly but typically chose not to do so unless among people he knew well. Deafness gave him no way to regulate his voice and his conversation was locked in a high-pitched monotone. Instead he typically turned to communicating in writing, carrying on personal conversations with the use of note cards, the backs of letters, scratch paper, and other handy paper. Archivist and historiographer Gary Topping noted that ...because Morgan’s deafness shifted his communication with the external world entirely to the written world, his world became a literary world, and the long hours of practice with the written world turned him into a virtuosos of English prose in the same way that musical practice produces virtuosity. (p. 118) As an adult his publication manuscripts exhibit heavy revisions and editing, while his letters flow through his manual typewriters and onto paper as seemingly seamless compositions, almost without typographic error.
The advent of the Depression, and Morgan’s deafness, reduced his ability to find employment after graduation from high school. However, an admiring English teacher found college funds for him in a vocational rehabilitation program. From 1933 to 1937, Morgan studied commercial art at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
, taking advantage of known talents and a personal interest in drawing and graphic layout. However, he found his personal interests drawn to literary studies and writing. He was a contributor to the student newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, and added to his writing experience by contributing creative work to The Pen, the student literary publication. At college he developed a close association with other students who would be recognized for history and literature. These included future historian Helen Zeese
Helen Z. Papanikolas
Helen Zeese Papanikolas was a Greek-American ethnic historian, novelist and folklorist who documented the immigrant experience in Utah and the American West through histories, memoirs, fiction, and poetry...
(later Papanikolas), and Ray Benedict West Jr. Two important relationships were formed with Daily Chronicle editor Richard Scowcroft and faculty advisor Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist, often called "The Dean of Western Writers"...
. Both men became novelists and operated the respected writing programme at Stanford University.
Career as historian
In 1937, with the country still in the Depression, Morgan was unable to find a position in commercial art and occupied spare time as an occasional book reviewer for a city newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune. In August 1938, again helped by a tip and recommendation from a friend, Morgan capitalized on his career as a reviewer to join the Utah Historical Records Survey as a part-time editor and publicist. Within a short time his ability to remember and associate facts brought him into a front-row position writing for the HRS. By 1940 he was transferred to the Utah Writers' Project to complete the state guidebook. Later he became director of the state branch of the Federal Writers Project.In these New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
relief programs, Morgan honed his skills in research and organization. He acquired a deep understanding of primary source material and information retrieval from his work in the library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Within months, he was a major figure in the survey of state and county records, organizing much of the work and completing the writing of surveys done for state and county archives. By 1940 he was overseeing both programs, and by 1942 had supervised the production of histories of Ogden
Ogden, Utah
Ogden is a city in Weber County, Utah, United States. Ogden serves as the county seat of Weber County. The population was 82,825 according to the 2010 Census. The city served as a major railway hub through much of its history, and still handles a great deal of freight rail traffic which makes it a...
and Provo
Provo, Utah
Provo is the third largest city in the U.S. state of Utah, located about south of Salt Lake City along the Wasatch Front. Provo is the county seat of Utah County and lies between the cities of Orem to the north and Springville to the south...
as well as acting as a primary writer of The WPA Guide To Utah. His work was well received by his superiors in the east and by local historians. Also in 1940, Morgan published the first substantive historical study of the Provisional State of Deseret
State of Deseret
The State of Deseret was a proposed state of the United States, propositioned in 1849 by Latter-day Saint settlers in Salt Lake City. The provisional state existed for slightly over two years and was never recognized by the United States government...
in the Utah Historical Quarterly, analyzing primary documents dealing with the State of Deseret
State of Deseret
The State of Deseret was a proposed state of the United States, propositioned in 1849 by Latter-day Saint settlers in Salt Lake City. The provisional state existed for slightly over two years and was never recognized by the United States government...
, including the constitution and early ordinances of the state, with a lengthy editorial introduction explaining their context. He also was involved in other writing projects, including the state contribution to a history of grazing in the western U.S. During this time he began exchanging correspondence with two women who would become well-respected writers, Juanita Brooks
Juanita Brooks
Juanita Pulsipher Brooks was an American historian and author, specializing in the American West and Mormon history, including books related to the Mountain Meadows massacre, to which her ancestor Dudley Leavitt was sometimes linked.-Biography:Born Juanita Leone Leavitt, Brooks was born and raised...
and Fawn M. Brodie
Fawn M. Brodie
Fawn McKay Brodie was a biographer and professor of history at UCLA, best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History, an early and still influential non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint...
. Morgan contributed substantively to the work of each as a mentor, critic, and advocate.
In 1942, unable to serve in the armed forces, Morgan moved to Washington, D.C. and worked in the central office of a war-rime regulatory agency, the Office of Price Administration. While there, his free time was spent using the relatively new National Archives and the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
, combing through federal records, reading methodically through hundreds of American newspapers and printed materials. This work netted him large files of typed transcriptions on Mormons, transmississippi Native Americans, the activities of fur traders of the 1820s through 1840s, and exploration. Working in these institutions, Morgan standardized and honed his skill as a researcher.
Morgan had arrived in Washington, D.C. with the idea of eventually producing an authoritative history of early Mormonism. In 1945 he was awarded a post-service Guggenheim Foundation research grant, which he activated in 1947. He left Washington, D.C. and continued his research in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and New England as well as along the Mormon Trail
Mormon Trail
The Mormon Trail or Mormon Pioneer Trail is the 1,300 mile route that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traveled from 1846 to 1868...
through Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, and Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, and into California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. In late 1947, again in Utah and desperately needing paying work, Morgan agreed to edit the Utah Historical Quarterly, publishing the journals of the John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell was a U.S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions...
expeditions of 1869-72 between 1947 and 1949. Of necessity Morgan acted as an independent historian between 1947 and 1952. During these years, he narrowed his focus to an intended three-volume history of Mormonism, but maintained his interest in the American fur trade and exploration. After leaving Utah again for Washington D.C. in 1949 and the cancellation of his Mormon-book contract in 1952, Morgan turned to other aspects of the American West and produced several authoritative books on the West still regarded as definitive, including Jedediah Smith
Jedediah Smith
Jedediah Strong Smith was a hunter, trapper, fur trader, trailblazer, author, cartographer, cattleman, and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the American West Coast and the Southwest during the 19th century...
and the Opening of the West (1953), and three bibliographies of Mormon sects.
Morgan was retained by the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
's Bancroft Library
Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library is the primary special collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired as a gift/purchase from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity...
director George P. Hammond as a researcher for the Hopi-Navajo land claim law suit in 1953. In 1954 an appointment as an editor and research assistant at the Bancroft ended Morgan’s precarious but productive years as an independent writer and pulled him to the West Coast. In California, his work and attention was drawn more fully into overland trail and California history. During his tenure at Bancroft he wrote or edited some forty books including the edited collection of documents in Overland in 1846 (1963) and The West of William H. Ashley (1964), as well as producing well received articles and reviews. He was named a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 1960 and received the Henry Raup Wagner Award in 1961. Morgan received a second Guggenheim fellowship in 1970 to support research toward a history of the American fur trade, which he never began. Morgan died of cancer in 1971 at the age of fifty-six.
Later researchers have benefited from Dale Morgan's painstaking scholarship, extensive collection of correspondence, and reams of transcripts. He was the moving force behind the first unified catalogue of works about Mormonism, which he proposed to the Utah State Historical Society in 1951. Using Morgan's list, which had been re-typed and supplemented as a card file, Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...
librarian Chad J. Flake completed and published A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930 (1978), with an introduction written by Morgan. Now in a second edition, it remains an indispensable reference work for scholars looking at Mormon history or sociology. Morgan's papers are at the Bancroft Library; most of his research library now forms part of the holdings of L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...
.
The Utah State Historical Society has established the annual "Dale L. Morgan Award," presented to the author of the best scholarly article published in the Utah Historical Quarterly.
Skills, viewpoint and criticism
Morgan was a great-grandson of Orson PrattOrson Pratt
Orson Pratt, Sr. was a leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and an original member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles...
, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Morgan’s family actively participated in church activities. Due to his sudden deafness, however, he drifted from the LDS faith and he did not affiliate with any religious organization as an adult. Morgan has been described by others as a "through going atheist". He was profoundly affected by the soft positivism of 1930s social psychology and took a stance in favor of historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
. Having rejected any religious motive as impossible, Morgan insisted that his work in western history and Mormonism present a completely objective, exclusively naturalistic viewpoint on religious matters, and encouraged other Utah and western historians to follow his example. In 1943, writing to S. A. Burgess, a historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ
Community of Christ
The Community of Christ, known from 1872 to 2001 as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints , is an American-based international Christian church established in April 1830 that claims as its mission "to proclaim Jesus Christ and promote communities of joy, hope, love, and peace"...
), Morgan said that his: "... viewpoint about Mormon history is that of the sociologist, the psychologist, the political, economic, and social historian."
Historian of the Latter Day Saint movement Jan Shipps
Jan Shipps
Jo Ann Barnett "Jan" Shipps is an American historian specializing in Mormon History, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. Shipps is generally regarded as the foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Latter Day Saint movement, having given particular attention to The...
credits Morgan, along with three other notable historians - Bernard DeVoto
Bernard DeVoto
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.- Life and work :He was born in Ogden, Utah...
, Fawn McKay Brodie, and Juanita Brooks
Juanita Brooks
Juanita Pulsipher Brooks was an American historian and author, specializing in the American West and Mormon history, including books related to the Mountain Meadows massacre, to which her ancestor Dudley Leavitt was sometimes linked.-Biography:Born Juanita Leone Leavitt, Brooks was born and raised...
, with establishing a basis for the new historiography of Mormonism through significant Mormon related works in the 1940s and 1950s.
Morgan's intellectual experience in the federal WPA
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects...
programs had both advantages and disadvantages for him as a historian. The independent nature of these programs encouraged his critical judgment and work ethic, forced him to work with a variety of people, and exposed him to a wide training ground on source development and research. However, it did not lead him to consider the larger meaning of the facts he gathered or to understand the philosophy and theory of history, as taught in an academic setting. In fact, during the trials of his career, he became quite antagonistic to academic requirements. In response to a negative academic review of a work by his friend DeVoto, he wrote: "...the term ‘history’ had better be redefined to mean, ’a species of writing produced by or enroute to a Ph.D.’ I have had enough troubles trying to break a path alongside this main-traveled road to know something of the snobberies at work here, and the ways in which the academic world and even the world of learning are geared to these attitudes." (p. 130)
According to Topping, this lack of perspective and understanding led Morgan to believe "...that historical facts contain their own meaning, and that the historian’s intellect ought to be active only in internal and external criticism, establishing the authenticity and credibility of sources, yet passive when it came to establishing the larger significance …" (p. 146) As a result, Morgan "...fell short of the interpretive potential of (his) sources...asserting that the facts would somehow convey their own meaning without any help from him…" (p. 6) However the same focus on fact, coupled to a spectacular memory for detail, allowed him to produced work of breathtaking detail and scope within the field. His strength and greatest contribution was as a documentary rather than synthetic historian.
Symposium on Morgan
In August 1985, SunstoneSunstone Magazine
Sunstone is a magazine published by the Sunstone Education Foundation, Inc., a 501 nonprofit corporation, that discusses Mormonism through scholarship, art, short fiction, and poetry. The foundation began the publication in 1974 and considers it a vehicle for free and frank exchange in The Church...
offered a segment on Dale Morgan and Mormon History as part of their annual symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Salt Lake City is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. The name of the city is often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC. With a population of 186,440 as of the 2010 Census, the city lies in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, which has a total population of 1,124,197...
. Historian William Mulder, a friend of Morgan, presented the segment.
Selected publications
- The State of Deseret (1940)
- Utah: A Guide to the State (1941)
- The Humboldt: Highroad of the West (1943)
- The Great Salt Lake (1947)
- Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953)
- Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail (1963)
- The West of William H. Ashley (1964)
With other writers and editors
- West from Fort Bridger: the pioneering of the Immigrant Trails across Utah, 1846-1850 original diaries and journals edited and with introductions by J. Roderic KornsJ. Roderic KornsJ Roderic "Rod" Korns was a 20th century editor, researcher and historian of the American west. He is best known for West from Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails Across Utah 1846-1850, completed with the assistance of historiographer and author Dale L. Morgan...
and Dale L. Morgan; originally published 1951. Revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler. Publisher: Logan, UtahLogan, Utah-Layout of the City:Logan's city grid originates from its Main and Center Street block, with Main Street running north and south, and Center east and west. Each block north, east, south, or west of the origin accumulates in additions of 100 , though some streets have non-numeric names...
: Utah State UniversityUtah State UniversityUtah State University is a public university located in Logan, Utah. It is a land-grant and space-grant institution and is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities....
Press, 1994. ISBN 0-87421-178-6. - Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs ed. Richard L. Saunders. Publisher: Logan, UtahLogan, Utah-Layout of the City:Logan's city grid originates from its Main and Center Street block, with Main Street running north and south, and Center east and west. Each block north, east, south, or west of the origin accumulates in additions of 100 , though some streets have non-numeric names...
: Utah State UniversityUtah State UniversityUtah State University is a public university located in Logan, Utah. It is a land-grant and space-grant institution and is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities....
Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-87421-651-6 - *The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson, with Eleanor T. Harris, (1967)