"New Mormon History" is the banner under which professional historians today approach Latter-day Saint historiography. Rather than bracketing data that challenges traditional assumptions, these scholars go where the evidence takes them, sometimes contextualizing what has been assumed to be supernatural and other times qualifying the presumably mundane.
For instance, it is said that sea gulls saved Mormon settlers' crops. New Mormon Historians approach this faith statement by asking whether anyone at the time reported it as a miracle, whether the event was a recurring expectation of farmers or an anomaly, and how it differed from the same incident reported among Catholics in southern California. On the other hand, considering the coincidence of the gold rush following the devastatingly low crop yields the first few years in Utah, scholars acknowledge the providential nature of this event for Latter-day Saints.
D. Michael Quinn has selected fifteen essays for this collection, each of which demonstrates the methods of this new history. Participants offer new ideas and give readers the opportunity to determine for themselves the relative successes of these interpretive approaches.
