Will Bagley - Editorial Work

Editorial Work

He served as editor of News from the Plains, the newsletter of the Oregon-California Trails Association, for two years. Continuing its hundred-year tradition of letting the people of the West recount their own history, in 1997 the Arthur H. Clark Company launched a new historical series, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Bagley is editor of this projected 15-volume series. The series presents essential source documents that look at the West through Mormon eyes and the Mormons through Western eyes. Published volumes describe the Mexican–American War, the conquest of California and the gold rush, the Brigham Young pioneer party of 1847, European visitors to “Zion,” Mormon polygamy, the Utah War, and the Mountain Meadows Massace. Thirteen volumes have appeared, most recently Richard L. Saunders' Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works Part 1, 1939–1951 and Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West, which Bagley edited with Polly Aird and Jeff Nichols.

Other significant volumes include Michael W. Homer’s On the Way to Somewhere Else: European Sojourners in the Mormon West; B. Carmon Hardy’s Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy, Its Origin, Practice, and Demise; William P. MacKinnon’s At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War of 1857; and Bagley and David L. Bigler’s Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.