With this excellent biography Roger Launius, thirty-five years old, has established himself as the foremost historian of the RLDS church. There are other RLDS historians who are better known in the community of Mormon historians (for example, official Church Historian Richard Howard, Temple School President Paul Edwards, and longtime Graceland professor of church history Alma Blair). But Launius, twenty or more years younger than each of these veteran church historians, already has the most impressive array of publications on the history of the Restoration movement of anyone in the RLDS church.
