Richard O. Cowan

Richard Olsen Cowan (born 1934) is a historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and a former professor in the Church History Department of Brigham Young University (BYU). He was one of the longest-serving BYU faculty and the longest-serving member of the Church History Department ever.

Cowan was raised in Los Angeles. He is legally blind and has had retinitis pigmentosa since birth, and by 2000 he had lost nearly all vision.

Halfway through his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Cowan served a mission for the LDS Church in the Spanish-American mission, among the Mexican immigrants in Texas and New Mexico from 1953 to 1956. On his mission he met Dawn Houghton, and they later married and had six children.

Cowan received his Bachelor of Arts in political science at Occidental College in 1958. He received an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1961 in American History, both from Stanford University. In 1959 he received an award from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, selected as one of four visually handicapped students in the United States.

Since 1961 Cowan has been a professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. Cowan received BYU's professor of the year award in 1965. He has taught at the BYU Jerusalem Center and in the spring of 2007 was a visiting professor at BYU-Hawaii. He retired from BYU in 2015.

Cowan helped write the LDS Church's Sunday School manual from 1978–80, on the Doctrine and Covenants and LDS history.

...
Wikipedia