1. Richard Lyman Bushman was born on June 20,1931 and is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, having previously taught at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware.
Richard Bushman was an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and now serves on the national advisory board.
Richard Bushman has been called "one of the most important scholars of American religious history" of the late-20th century.
Richard Bushman grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When he was a young child, Richard Bushman's family moved to Portland, Oregon.
Richard Bushman married fellow historian Claudia Lauper Richard Bushman in August 1955, and the couple reared six children.
Richard Bushman continued at Harvard, earning Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in the history of American civilization, studying with the early American historian Bernard Bailyn.
Richard Bushman received a Sheldon Fellowship to work on his dissertation in London.
Richard Bushman taught at Brigham Young University from 1960 to 1968, though two of those years he spent studying history and psychology on a doctoral fellowship at Brown University.
Richard Bushman was awarded a year-long fellowship in 1969 at Harvard's Charles Warren Center and then was recruited to teach by Boston University.
In 1977, Richard Bushman moved to the University of Delaware to work with material culture resources at the Winterthur Museum.
In 1992, Richard Bushman was named the first Gouverneur Morris Professor of History.
At the latter, in 1997, Richard Bushman began writing a biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling, and he retired from Columbia in 2001 in order to complete it.
From 2008 to 2011, Bushman served as the first Howard W Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and held a Huntington Library fellowship.
Outside professoriate settings, in the twenty-first century Richard Bushman worked as an editor and later a national advisory board member for the Joseph Smith Papers, a project of the Church History Department.
Richard Bushman has continued writing both early American and Mormon history.
Richard Bushman's scholarship includes studies of early American social, cultural, and political history; American religious history, and early Latter-day Saint history.
Richard Bushman has received the Phi Alpha Theta prize, and Evans Biography Awards, administered by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.
Richard Bushman published Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, which was awarded best biography from the Mormon History Association in 1985.
Richard Bushman has held Guggenheim, Huntington, National Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships; and served as president of the Mormon History Association.
Bushman was honored at the January 2011 annual meeting of the American Historical Association where a breakout session entitled "A Retrospective on the Scholarship of Richard Bushman" was heavily attended.
Unsure how to reply, Richard Bushman began wondering if there was "enough evidence to believe in God", becoming "drawn toward agnosticism" as a result.
Richard Bushman later held various religious callings within the LDS Church, including seminary teacher, bishop, stake president, and stake patriarch.