Patheos Featured Writers

Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University in New York City, and currently visiting Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California.  He was born in Salt Lake City and reared in Portland, Oregon.  Educated at Harvard College, he earned an A.M. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University.  His first book, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1967), was awarded the Bancroft Prize. He has also published Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1984), King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985); The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992); and Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005).