Don Bradley
Don Bradley is a writer, editor, and researcher specializing in early Latter-day Saint history.
He completed a BA degree in history at Brigham Young University and an MA degree in history at Utah State and performed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project.
He won the 2021 Mormon History Association Best Article Award for his work on the Kinderhook plates and is currently a Joseph Smith historian with Scripture Central. He is the author of The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Missing Contents of the Book of Mormon. He was the primary researcher for Brian C. Hales’s three-volume Joseph Smith’s Polygamy series.
Bradley grew up on the East Coast and at the age of 15, after the family moved to Indiana, he started research to strengthen his testimony. He began to doubt his faith at about the age of 17. He served a full-time mission to Houston Texas, and after his mission he pursued more research on the issues he grappled with. By the age of 30, he was an atheist, had his membership removed from the Church, and lived for five years outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Staying curious about faith in God helped bring him back to the Church. He credits practicing gratitude as a significant contribution to bringing him back.
