Brian Q. Cannon graduated from BYU with a BA in American studies in 1984. He completed an MA in history at Utah State University in 1986 and a PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. Since that time, he has been teaching at BYU. Much of his research focuses upon agricultural settlement, rural community development and federal rural policy in the twentieth century. He has received fellowships or other awards from the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.

These oral histories are related to the Federal Resettlement Project in Utah, which was part of a broader New Deal resettlement project in the United States during the Great Depression. The program sought to make better use of the nation's natural resources by reassigning poor farmers from marginal to productive land. The undertaking was supervised by various governmental departments including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Resettlement Administration, and the Farms Security Administration from the 1930s until the early 1940s.