Apply for the 60th Annual Mormon History Association Conference in Ogden, UT

The Mormon History Association invites you to Ogden, Utah for its sixtieth annual conference to be held June 5-8, 2025. Situated on the Ogden and Weber Rivers near where they join the Great Salt Lake, and nicknamed “Junction City” when it became the connecting point between numerous railroad lines, Ogden has long been a site of junctions. Long before Latter-day Saints dreamed of an American Zion in the Great Basin, ancestors of Shoshone and other indigenous peoples criss-crossed the region, establishing trade networks and sharing languages, settlements, and cultures.

Ogden highlights a confluence of events and dynamics that shaped Mormon settlement, identity, and culture, and ensured that the tradition would always be intertwined with the wider world. The railroad especially brought diverse groups to Ogden. Wealthy investors and industrialists as well as Black Americans and Chinese, Japanese, German, and Irish immigrants were drawn to the burgeoning railroad town and its economic opportunities, bringing greater influence from the margins. They built communities that both constituted and contradicted centers of Latter-day Saint power, resulting in diversity, and alternative directions. World War II brought a military base, prisoner of war camps, and defense industries.  Later immigration trends further heightened the diverse influences and people that would shape Utah and today’s global church. Influenced by outside elements, Ogden’s Mormon community continued to develop a unique religious and cultural brand that included diverse politics and a cultural presence perhaps best represented by the Osmonds, as well as iconic Mormon composer Janice Kapp Perry. Ogden also produced several prominent western historians including Fawn Brodie, Bernard Devoto, and more recently Thomas Alexander, a founding member of MHA.

“Junction City” invites us to widen the lens and remember the many histories of interaction and influence that have shaped and been shaped by Restoration traditions. Ogden’s Union Station embodies the variety of these historical junctures, sitting as it does at the intersection of Wall Avenue’s business world and 25th Street’s demimonde history. Our 2025 theme, “Junctions and Communities,” invites presentations that explore the Restoration movement as a hub of internally intersecting variation with a history long enmeshed in broader worlds, contexts, and contingencies. ​​The deadline for proposals is November 1, 2024. Submit by clicking here. Questions may be sent to the program committee co-chairs at mhaogden2025@mormonhistoryassociation.org. Notifications for acceptance and rejections will be sent by January 17, 2025.