Richard E. Turley Jr. is the author or editor of five books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre: Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2008), with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard; Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collections (Brigham Young University Press and University of Utah Press, 2009), with Ronald W. Walker; Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, Selected Trial Records and Aftermath and Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, Initial Investigations and Indictments (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), with Janiece Johnson and LaJean Purcell Carruth; and Vengeance Is Mine: The Massacre at Mountain Meadows and Its Aftermath (Oxford University Press, 2023), with Barbara Jones Brown.

He has received numerous honors for his work, including from the American Historical Association, the American Library Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Mormon History Association, the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists, the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation, the Utah State Historical Society, Utah Humanities, the John Whitmer Historical Association, Latter-day Saints in Publishing, Media & the Arts, the Association for Mormon Letters, and Westerners International. 

Susan Easton Black was reared in Long Beach, California. Susan was the first woman to teach religion at BYU and the first woman to receive the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award for her research and writing, the highest award given a professor at BYU. She was the recipient of the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award in writing from the Latter-day Saint Publishing & Media Association. Susan taught at Brigham Young University for 38 years and is now a guest instructor at the Institute at UVU. She has written over 150 books. Susan has served two missions for the Historic Sites Department, a mission as a psychologist for LDS Social Services, a mission to the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, a mission in the St. George Temple Visitors’ Center, and a mission to the Priesthood and Family Department of the Church. Susan is the mother of three sons. She enjoys writing, speaking, and being with her husband George.

Christopher Rich is an Associate Historian at the Church History Library. He has a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and an LL.M. from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah. He is co-author of the multiple award-winning book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah. He has also published articles in the fields of Latter-day Saint History and National Security Law. He served for 11 years in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and continues to serve in the Army Reserves.

Casey Paul Griffiths is an Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. Before coming to BYU he worked for eleven years as a teacher and curriculum writer in Seminaries & Institutes. He is an active member of the Mormon History Association, the Latter-day Saint Education Society, and the John Whitmer Historical Association. He is the co-host of the Church History Matters Podcast and the host of Restoration Revealedfor Scripture Central. He is the author and editor of dozens of articles and several books, including Restorations: Scholars in Dialogue from Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is also active in the historical community and has served as president of the John Whitmer Historical Association. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their four adorable children in Saratoga Springs, Utah. 

Richard E. Bennett was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada where he attended Sudbury High School. After studying one year at Brigham Young University he served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Texas from 1967-1969. He later graduated from BYU with a B.A. in English Literature and a master’s degree in American History. He obtained his Ph.D. from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. For twenty years he was Head of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba. There he and his wife, Patricia Dyer, raised a family of five children. In 1997 he was invited to join the faculty of the Dept. of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. He retired from BYU in 2021 to serve with his wife as mission president of the Mormon Trails Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Professor Bennett has authored nine books and over seventy articles, primarily on LDS 19th century history. Some of his better-known works include Mormons at the Missouri, 1846-1852, We’ll Find the Place – The Mormon Exodus, 1846-1848; 1820 – Dawning of the Restoration, and Temples Rising: A Heritage of Sacrifice. He is currently working on a co-authored manuscript tentatively entitled Out Of Egypt: The Coming Forth of the Book of Abraham.

Gerrit Dirkmaat is an associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2010, where he studied nineteenth-century American expansionism and foreign relations. His dissertation was titled “Enemies Foreign and Domestic: US Relations with Mormons in the US Empire in North America, 1844–1854.” He worked as a historian and writer for the Church History Department from 2010 to 2014 with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and served as a volume editor/historian for Documents Volume 1: 1828-1831, Documents Volume 3: 1833-1834, Documents Volume 8: 1841 and Administrative Records, Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846. He is the coauthor, along with Michael Hubbard MacKay, of the award-winning book From Darkness unto Light: Joseph Smith’s Translation and Publication of the Book of Mormon, published by the BYU Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book in 2015. In 2023, they published another book on the topic: Let’s Talk About the Translation of the Book of Mormon. It discussed many of the questions people have about the translation process. He is also one of the historians that published the first volume of the Brigham Young Journals, published by BYU Press in 2023. In addition to books, Gerrit is also the author of dozens of academic articles. In 2015 he published a groundbreaking analysis of the differences between the originally recorded versions of Utah-era sermons of Brigham Young and other Church leaders and those later published in the Journal of Discourses. This article, “The Prophets Have Spoken, But What Did They Say?: Examining the Differences Between George D. Watt’s Original Shorthand Notes and the Sermons Published in the Journal of Discourses,” won the 2016 Article of Excellence Award from the Mormon History Association. Before his work at the Church History Department, he served as the senior assistant editor of Diplomatic History from 2003 to 2009. He currently serves as the editor of the academic journal Latter-day Saint Historical Studies published by the Ensign Peak Foundation. Since 2021 he has hosted and produced a weekly Church history podcast: Standard of Truth. It examines Church history questions and sources. He and his wife, Angela, have four children.

Reid L. Neilson was named the assistant academic vice president for religious scholarly publications in 2022. In this position, Neilson oversees three organizations on campus: the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the Religious Studies Center, and BYU Studies. Prior to this appointment, Neilson served full time as president of the Washington DC North Mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2019 to 2022.

Prior to his mission presidency, Neilson was appointed as assistant Church historian and recorder and managing director for The Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. He also worked as the managing director of the Church History Department from 2010 to 2019. There he oversaw all department operations and facilities, including the Church History Library, the Church History Museum and the Granite Mountain Records Vault. During these years he served on the editorial boards of the Deseret Book Company, the Joseph Smith Papers and the Church Historian’s Press.

A native of Southern California, Neilson received his BA in international relations from BYU in 1996. After graduation he worked for Arthur Andersen’s Strategy, Finance, and Economics Division in Los Angeles and London, consulted for Walt Disney’s Strategic Planning Division in Tokyo, and researched for the University of Michigan Business School’s Asia-Pacific Human Resources Partnership in Hong Kong. He took graduate degrees in American history and business administration at Brigham Young University in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In 2006 he completed his PhD in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was named an International Studies Scholar for Tomorrow Fellow.

Neilson began his career as an assistant professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU in Provo, Utah. He is the author of several books and has written many essays, book chapters, and introductions and presented dozens of papers on religion, history, and business at a variety of academic conferences. He is writing a history of Mormon missionary work entitled God’s Army, which was published by Oxford University Press.

After serving a full-time mission in the Japan Sapporo Mission, Neilson married Shelly Anderson. They are the parents of three children and enjoy snow skiing and international travel as a family.

Lisa Olsen Tait was an adjunct professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University when this was written. Lisa Olsen Tait recently completed a PhD in English at the University of Houston, with a dissertation on Susa Young Gates, the Young Woman’s Journal, and transitional Mormonism in the 1890s. Her research focuses on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and culture, with a special interest in women writers, popular fiction, and Mormon magazines.

Dr. Ronald Kent Esplin was the managing editor of the Joseph Smith Papers project when this was written and the former director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University. Esplin served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Central American Mission, when that mission not only included all the countries from Guatemala to Panama, but also had Colombia within its borders.

Esplin holds degrees from Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and the University of Virginia. As managing editor of the Joseph Smith Papers project, Esplin has been working to make it so that once the papers come out they are available in many libraries around the world. Esplin also served as the president of the Mormon History Association from 2006 to 2007.

LaJean Purcell Carruth is the shorthand editor for Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. She is a professional transcriber of 19th- and early 20th-century documents written in Pitman and Taylor shorthands and in the Deseret Alphabet at the Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. Over the past forty years, she has transcribed Mormon and Quaker sermons, minutes, legislative proceedings, court proceedings, journals, letters, and other items. She has repeatedly presented scholarly papers on her work at such academic venues as the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Mormon History Association, and the Communal Studies Association, and her transcriptions have been published in BYU Studies as well as online and have been quoted in numerous books and articles. She holds master’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Library and Information Science (1974) and Humanities (1978), and a Ph.D. in German from the University of Utah (1988).