Utah & the Mormons First Fifty Years Together: A Conversation with LDS Church Historians Matt Grow and Scott Hales (Season 4, Ep. 3)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Dept. of Culture & Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. I hope if there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast, or if this is your first time listening, please go back and listen to dozens of other prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Googles, and elsewhere. Finally, if you have an idea, or you know someone who you want us to interview, please go to askahistorian at utah.gov. Our topic for this Speak Your Piece episode is the book Saints, 1847 to 1893, No Unhallowed Hand, which is the second volume in a multi-volume work which speaks to 19th century Utah history, along with the internationally expanding church.
It is the Utah history side that we'll be focusing on today. The series subtitle is The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Latter Days, and was published in 2020 Our conversation will be with two of the general editors of this series. First, Dr. Matthew J. Grow, Managing Director of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
In that capacity, he leads a team of history professionals who collect and document and gather artifacts and preserve and promote everything associated with understanding the Church's past through published programs, research library, a museum, and many, many historic sites. Grow previously served as the general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. He has published widely on Latter Day Saint history and American religious history.
Matt received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife, Alyssa, lived with their four children in Sandy, Utah.
My second guest today is Dr. Scott Hales, who has been a writer and historian for the Church History Department since 2015
He currently serves as a general editor and lead writer for Saints, the aforementioned four-volume history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He has a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati. He has published several articles and academic journals on subjects related to Latter Day Saints, poetry and fiction. He lives in Eagle Mountain.
Hello, Matt. Hello, Scott. Thank you for being on Speak Your Piece.

**Matthew J. Grow** (3:14)
Thanks for having us, Brad.

**Scott Hales** (3:15)
Thanks for inviting us.

**Brad Westwood** (3:18)
Scott and Matt, what were the expectations, the intentions of this series?

**Matthew J. Grow** (3:25)
Maybe I'll take that one first and then throw it to Scott. So this is Vol. 2 of a four-volume series, and the intent is to have a narrative history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that will be read by people throughout the world.
So we're trying to combine the best historical research and methodology, new perspectives on the Church's past with a narrative that will be engaging and lively and insightful that can truly be read by Latter Day Saints, whether they're a seventh-generation Latter Day Saint living in Salt Lake City, or a first-generation Latter Day Saint living in Brazil or Nigeria. So there is this worldwide ambition for the project.

**Scott Hales** (4:14)
For this volume especially, we were very interested in helping Church members understand the history of the Saints after they arrive here in the Salt Lake Valley.
I think a lot of Church members are familiar with the early history of the Church, and they know the story up until the Saints arrive here in the Valley, but they don't really know what happened afterwards, between the arrival here in the Valley and the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple. So this was really our chance to kind of educate them about this history.

**Matthew J. Grow** (4:43)
And I'd add, too, that while the core audience that we see is members of the Church, that's who we're writing to, I think the book can be profitably read by anyone interested in Utah history. You're going to find stories in Utah history, I think, that you've never heard before, and put in context of the history of the Church, which is just so fundamental to Utah history in the second half of the 19th century.
I think one of the real insights here is how international the Church was in the second half of the 19th century, and thus, how international Utah was and how diverse and how vibrant the territory was with immigrants and outreach from all over the world.