Richard L. Bushman was born on 1931, in
Salt Lake City,
Utah. His father, Ted Bushman (1902–1980), was a fashion illustrator, advertiser, and department store executive, and his mother, Dorothy Lyman; 1908–1995), was a secretary and homemaker. Bushman grew up as a member of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Bushman married fellow historian
Claudia Lauper Bushman in August 1955, and the couple reared six children. 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. Bushman received a Sheldon Fellowship to work on his dissertation in
London. 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. In 1968, he won the
Bancroft Prize for his published dissertation,
From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765. 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, Bushman moved to the University of Delaware to work with material culture resources at the
Winterthur Museum. Bushman's "major work on refinement and gentility dated from those years, which included a year-long fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution." In 1989, Bushman was asked to teach
American colonial history at Columbia University. In 1992, Bushman was named the first Gouverneur Morris Professor of History. During his time at Columbia, he completed year-long fellowships at the Davis Center at
Princeton, the
National Humanities Center, and the
Huntington Library. At the latter, in 1997, 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. In 2012, the University of Virginia established the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, the chair funded with a $3-million endowment by anonymous donors. In 2018,
Yale University Press published his
The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History. By 2020, Bushman had spent almost a decade intermittently writing a cultural history of the
golden plates that Joseph Smith had described as the source of the
Book of Mormon. ==Awards and honors==