Born on August 28, 1928, Hill completed his
Master of Arts in history at BYU in 1955. He received a PhD in American
intellectual history from the
University of Chicago in 1968 and studied under
Martin E. Marty and wrote his dissertation on
Christian primitivism and Mormonism. Hill attended the University of Chicago at the same time as
Dallin H. Oaks, and their mutual interest in the
murder of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith in
Illinois led to a ten-year research effort. Together, they published the book
Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith in 1975 while both were working at BYU, Hill as a professor of history and Oaks as the
president of BYU. It won the
Mormon History Association's best book award for 1976. Hill was a professor of
American history at BYU starting in the 1960s. In 1972, he took leave from BYU to accept a
post-doctoral research fellowship at
Yale University. He has also served as president of the Mormon History Association and on the board of editors of the
Journal of Mormon History. In Mormon studies, Hill was a well-known proponent of the
new Mormon history and advocated a "middle ground" approach that did not seek to describe Mormonism as authentic or fraudulent. Hill married Lila Foster in 1953. They had six children and lived in
Provo,
Utah. He was the brother of Donna Marie Hill (1921–2007), the author of the noted 1977 biography
Joseph Smith, the First Mormon. He died in
Pleasant Grove, Utah, on July 27, 2016. == Awards ==