Both also improved their church-related educational institutions, constructing new facilities and expanding their faculties. In creating modern church bureaucracies, both ecclesiastical institutions added staff and professionalized their historical and archival departments, hiring well-trained historians as they did so. Perhaps inadvertently, both LDS ecclesiastical bodies also facilitated development of the new Mormon history in two direct ways. In the 1960s historians in the forefront of the new Mormon history created a stable framework for the movement by establishing the Mormon History Association and, along with other young Mormon intellectuals, beginning publication of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Bushman, a lifelong member of the LDS Church who earned his degree at Harvard University, was one of this band of well-schooled scholars.
Still embryonic in the 1950s, this intellectual wave did not fully take shape as a movement until a substantial cohort of young members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah (the LDS Church), and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints headquartered in Independence, Missouri (the RLDS Church), earned their doctorates in history from reputable graduate schools outside the Mormon culture region. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman’s biography of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, is the crowning achievement of the new Mormon history, an intellectual and historiographical movement that carried the story of the Latter-day Saints into the cultural mainstream just as Mormonism itself was moving in from the margins to find a place on the American religious landscape as a respectable belief system and an upstanding faith community.
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