At the 2025 John Whitmer Historical Association Annual Conference, members gathered for the Awards Presentation, an occasion to recognize outstanding scholarship in Restoration studies.
Eric Rogers, chair of both the Book Awards Committee and the Article Awards Committee, opened the program by expressing gratitude for the opportunity to serve and for the dedicated colleagues on both committees. “Each year, these awards give us the opportunity to recognize outstanding work that deepens our understanding of Restoration traditions,” Rogers noted. From carefully crafted articles to landmark books, biographies, anthologies, and documentary histories, the works honored this year represent the best of historical research, storytelling, and analysis.
Committee members were also acknowledged for their careful reading and evaluation. Serving on the Article Awards Committee were Julianne Briscoe, David Wilson, Bryce Blankenagel, and Nancy Ross; the Book Awards Committee included Mel Johnson, Makoto Hunter, and Dima Hurlbut. Rogers further thanked all nominees for their contributions, encouraged members to engage with their scholarship, and recognized the generous donors who make the awards possible: the Smith-Pettit Foundation; Dan and Beth Whittemore; Greg and Cynthia Kofford; Katherine Pollock; Jerry Mogg; Joe Geisner; and Stephanie and Eric Rogers.
Award Presentations
Pollock Best Historical Article
Presented by Bryce Blankenagel
“Today I’m elated to present this year’s Pollock Best Historical Article Award. This award goes to particularly outstanding historical articles and our choice this year was Rockin’ the Regime: Mormon Missionaries, American Popular Music, and the Fading of Spanish Fascism authored by Ryan Davis.
A little bit about this article, as the title connotes, it examines the history of a flash in the pan popular music group Los Salt Lake City who gained significant traction in Spain as part of a missionary outreach program. However, during the 70s when they reached the zenith of their popularity, Lost Salt Lake City dabbled into political activism through their music in the face of a ‘regime that increasingly faced challenges to its legitimacy’ who ‘cracked down on anything that smacked of subversion’.
What follows is a fascinating tale of a Salt Lake City Mormon music group singing popular bops, distinct covers, and stylized hymns to an audience who didn’t even know who ‘Mormon’ was. Importantly, the article positions the band within the larger context of global geopolitical influences, tracing the cultural excitement to receive the band back to the entrance of Mormonism into the country following the Madrid Pact of 1953.
The author, Ryan Davis, spent considerable time locating original sources and interviewing the band members to compose a thoughtful, refreshing history of music, political activism opposing fascist regimes, and contemporary political dialogue to paint a picture, allowing readers to almost feel like they were there when LSLC played to sold-out crowds.
Quoting briefly from the conclusion, Davis says: ‘Beneath the quixotic surface of the missionary rockers of LSLC was a Sancho Panza-Esque practicality… the missionary-musicians of LSLC were young and modern, if more inclined to religion than to revolution. They knew it; they just needed to convince Spaniards of it. And popular music provided the perfect tool to do so.’
Davis wrote a fascinating article coming from a perspective of Mormonism we don’t often see represented within the Mormon and he has the original sources and contemporary perspectives to color a picture of anti-fascist activism we could all take a lesson from. Ryan Davis, thank you for your incredible contribution to Mormon studies.”
Greg Kofford Best Historical Article
Presented by Julianne Briscoe
“The winner of the Greg Kofford Best Historical Article is Unholy Waters: The Role of Alcohol in Identity and Boundary Creation Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by William Perez.
We were impressed by how the article moves forward the scholarship on the Word of Wisdom, an important part of Mormon history, but seemingly one whose history isn’t studied very often. Perez brings new perspectives on how Mormon identity was shaped by the rejection of alcohol, how it is used in maintaining boundaries of members and how it was used by different leaders to maintain their leadership and how it was even used to foster assimilation into the broader American culture of the temperance movement and in part to end the isolation of members in Utah.
Perez shows that members were instructed in the Word of Wisdom in the early days of the church inconsistently, being taught only as good advice, but then changed so that members who drink cannot be in good standing with the church. He walks us through Utah, being one of the last to ratify prohibition to vote to repeal it, much to the chagrin of Heber J. Grant.
Suzanne Geisner & Jerry Mogg Best Anthology
Presented by Makoto Hunter
“This year’s Suzanne Geisner & Jerry Mogg Best Anthology Award recognizes Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, published by Cornell University Press. Edited by David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones, this collection of essays gathers some of the brightest minds studying the history of Christian mission in both the Protestant and Restoration traditions.
Both historically detailed and historiographically rigorous, the essays not only juxtapose Christian mission histories from both traditions, nor merely place them into abstract dialogue, but moreover highlight continuities, borrowings, contrasts, and distinctives in both the unfolding of events and the theorizing of research, whether in the transdenominational cultural chauvinism of Euro-American Protestants and Latter-day Saints among the Indigenous Shoshone or in the interdenominational missiological meaning-making of Baptists and Community of Christ in the Sora highlands of India.
Missionary Interests represents the cutting edge of Restoration studies, its integration within the wider sphere of the humanities, and, as this award recognizes, a high expression of this Association’s academic values.”
Alma Blair Best Biography
Presented by Makoto Hunter
“The 2025 Alma Blair Best Biography Award recognizes Cristina Gagliano, formerly Rosetti, for her book Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist. An entry in the University of Illinois Press’s award-winning series Introductions to Mormon Thought, Gagliano’s biography extends a legacy of research into the history of Mormon Fundamentalism, much of that earlier work pioneered by members of this Association.
Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist builds on this historiography exceptionally productively, reconstructing Musser not only as a devout Mormon committed to what he believed was the religion Joseph Smith restored, not solely as an important logistical and pastoral leader for early post-Manifesto polygamists, but moreover as a detailed thinker who articulated the intellectual architecture of the Fundamentalist movement.
Musser’s history of priesthood, theology of family, advocacy of economic cooperation, and modern mentality all became hallmarks of Mormon Fundamentalism across its many denominations, organizations, groups, and independents. That Gagliano’s biography of Musser may likewise become a hallmark of historical studies of Fundamentalism should be this Association’s hope; may researchers for years to come continue to learn from her thorough documentation, ethnographic ethics, and interdisciplinary erudition.”
Whittemore Best Documentary History
Presented by Eric Rogers
“This afternoon I have the privilege of presenting the 2025 Whittemore Best Documentary History Award, given by the John Whitmer Historical Association.
This year’s award goes to Fifty Years of Exponent II, edited by Katie Ludlow Rich and Heather Sundahl, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and published by Signature Books, whose commitment to preserving Restoration voices is well known to this community.
From its beginnings at a Boston kitchen table in the early 1970s, Exponent II has provided a vital space for Latter-day Saint and post–Latter-day Saint women to share their voices, their struggles, and their hopes. The volume brings together more than a hundred selections—essays, poetry, reflection, and analysis—framed with introductions that place each era in context. The result is both a documentary history and a living record of women’s thought and community.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich captures the significance of this work in her afterword, noting how Exponent II offered models of religious commitment, activism, and achievement that continue to inspire today. This remarkable book is a starting place for anyone seeking to understand the impact of Second Wave feminism on the lives of Latter-day Saint women.
Though editors Ludlow Rich and Sundahl, along with Barbara Jones Brown of Signature Books, cannot be here today because of the Exponent II Retreat in New Hampshire, we warmly congratulate them on receiving the 2025 Whittemore Best Documentary History Award.”
Smith-Pettit Best Book
Presented by Eric Rogers
“This afternoon I have the privilege of presenting the 2025 Smith-Pettit Best Book Award.
This year’s award goes to Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, authored by my friend and colleague Matthew L. Harris, and published by Oxford University Press.
This groundbreaking study examines one of the most difficult chapters in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the restrictions that denied Black members access to priesthood ordination and temple participation for more than a century. Drawing on letters, journals, oral histories, and official records, Harris reconstructs both the institutional debates that shaped these policies and the lived experiences of those who endured exclusion yet persevered with extraordinary resilience.
What I admire most about Second-Class Saints is the way it combines meticulous research with deep humanity. It tells a difficult story with both rigor and compassion, situating LDS history within broader currents of civil rights and social change, while also recovering overlooked voices that speak with courage and moral clarity.
For all of us engaged in the study of Restoration traditions, this book offers not only documentation of a painful past within Mormonism but also an invitation to reflect on how struggles for equality have shaped faith communities and historical memory.
On behalf of the John Whitmer Historical Association, we warmly congratulate Matthew L. Harris on receiving the 2025 Smith-Pettit Best Book Award.”
Special Recognitions
Excellence in Leadership Award
Presented by Mark Staker
“Presented this 19th day of September 2025 to Jason Smith for your contributions to the association as Podcast Chair 2023—2025.”
Lifetime Achievement Award
Presented by Mark Staker
“Presented to William Grant McMurray in grateful appreciation for continued courage, wisdom, and dedicated scholarship.” Read full presentation here.
Affirming a Collective Commitment
The 2025 JWHA Awards Presentation highlighted the remarkable range of scholarship in Restoration studies—articles, anthologies, biographies, documentary histories, and books that push the field forward. Just as importantly, it affirmed the collective commitment of scholars, editors, publishers, donors, and readers who make this work possible.
