‘Mormon Land’: Remembering historian D. Michael Quinn — his contributions, his conflicts, his legacy and his life
Fellow historian Ross Peterson reflects on his friend, who was excommunicated from the LDS Church but never stopped believing in it.
(Tribune file photo) HIstorian D. Michael Quinn at the LDS Church History Library on Aug. 9, 2013. Quinn died last week at age 77.
D. Michael Quinn, the noted historian who died last week at 77, had an outsized impact on academic explorations of the church’s past.
He was a prodigious researcher, who wrote 10 books and numerous essays. Though a believer in the faith’s founding events, Quinn resigned from church-owned Brigham Young University under pressure and subsequently was excommunicated from the faith in 1993 as part of the famed “September Six” for his writings about women and the priesthood, as well as about post-Manifesto polygamy.
On this week’s show, Ross Peterson, retired professor of history at Utah State University and former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, discusses Quinn’s life and work.
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