New Mormon History

The New Mormon History is a named historiographical movement that recurs across three of Kyle’s books. American Zion dates its rise to a generation of believing historians “less anxious to sacralize Mormonism’s past and more eager to place it within its historical context,” who “used tools from the secular academy to confront myths and stories that had long been taken for granted.” Its central figure is Leonard Arrington — the first credentialed scholar appointed church historian (1972), who opened the archives to all researchers and championed a history that could “stand on two legs—the leg of faith and the leg of reason.” His economic study Great Basin Kingdom (1958), arguing that scholars cannot apprehend God’s truth and so must offer a “naturalistic discussion,” made him the movement’s dean.

American Zion also records the institutional backlash: when Arrington’s division produced The Story of the Latter-day Saints (1976), leaders feared it gave too little space for divinity, declined to reprint it for two decades, canceled the planned sesquicentennial history series, and by 1982 released Arrington as church historian — with several of his fellow historians later excommunicated and archives re-restricted. Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History frames Arrington as the person “more responsible than anybody else” for the objective-rather-than-apologetic approach that “created the whole discipline,” a stance later made unavoidable by the internet (“there are no more secrets”). An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins situates Grant H. Palmer’s revisionist work explicitly within “what has been termed the New Mormon History,” though Kyle reads Palmer with active disagreement.

Context: The New Mormon History refers to the scholarly turn, roughly from the 1950s–60s onward, in which historians of the Latter-day Saint movement applied secular academic methods to the Mormon past while often remaining believers — distinct from both faith-promoting apologetics and hostile exposé.

Where this appears

• American Zion — names the movement, dates its emergence under Joseph Fielding Smith’s successors, and details Arrington’s appointment and later release.
• Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History — biography crediting Arrington with founding the objective, non-apologetic discipline of Mormon historical research.
• An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins — Grant H. Palmer’s revisionist survey, positioned as part of the New Mormon History and read by Kyle with skepticism.