Dissertations in LDS History

Over the years, graduate students have written many important dissertations on LDS topics. Unfortunately, they have typically been unavailable or unknown to lay readers. All too often, good copies of dissertations reside only at the institution at which they were written or on a few researchers’ bookshelves. BYU Studies and the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History hope to fill this gap by producing and distributing selected dissertations of interest to Latter-day Saints, making them available to a larger audience.

The works in this series have been reformatted from the originals and a subject index has been added. Nevertheless, these dissertations have undergone only minimal editing. For example, some typographical errors have been corrected. Original page numbers are referenced by superscripted italicized numerals in brackets (e.g., ^[3]). Occasionally, the author has included additional information in the endnotes to update old material. Those additions have been placed in brackets and italicized to distinguish them from the original text. Otherwise, the text is identical to the work accepted by the dissertation committee.