October 1st is the deadline!

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The forty-third meeting of the Mormon History Association will be held at the Red Lion Hotel in Sacramento, California, May 22-25, 2008. Although proposals for papers on a wide variety of topics related to Mormon history are welcome, this meeting in Sacramento presents a unique opportunity to consider Mormon pioneer history in the broader context of the settlement of the American West, as well as issues related to twentieth-century LDS expansion to California and beyond. The theme "Growth and Gateways: Mormonism in a Wider World" reflects these areas of inquiry.

Northern California was the point of arrival for the first Mormon colonizers in the West when Sam Brannan and his group on the ship Brooklyn arrived in Yerba Buena, present-day San Francisco, on July 31, 1846. Brannan established the first Mormon newspaper in the West -- the California Star -- and the first West-Coast Mormon community, New Hope. Mormon Battalion veterans helped discover gold near Sacramento and Brannan operated a store there as the city became the booming supply center for the Gold Rush. The small Mormon branch established in Sacramento in the 1870s -- the only LDS branch in the state at the time -- was a way-station for late nineteenth-century missionaries bound for San Francisco and the Pacific Islands. In the twentieh-century, California became the home of the first large concentration of Mormons outside the intermountain region. As rapid growth continued, California was the place where Church leaders first confronted the challenges of integrating and organizing a substantial membership in the midst of a larger community with diverse cultural and religious values.

Proposals addressing the theme, as well as proposals on other topics of interest to the field of Mormon history, are due October 1, 2007. Please include a proposal form (available as of July 1 at www.mhahome.org) with your submission. Due to the growing number of submissions for MHA meetings, the Program Committee prefers proposals of full panels (three papers and a commentator), but, as always, single papers are also welcom.

Proposals should be mailed to the Program Committee chair, Susan L. Fales, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602.. Electronic proposals may also be sent, by the deadline, to susan_fales@byu.edu (underscore after susan). Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be mailed by january 15, 2008.

2008 MHA Program Committee
Susan L. Fales, Co-Chair
John M. Murphy, Co-Chair
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah