Peterson was born in Snowflake, Arizona in 1927. Born into a Latter-day Saint family, he served in the U.S. Army (1945–46) and served on a church mission to Sweden (1947–49), where he worked with Ezra Taft Benson. Upon the completion of his mission, he studied at Brigham Young University, graduating with a BA in 1953, the year of his marriage to Elizabeth "Betty" Hayes. The couple had six children while Peterson continued his studies, earning an MA (BYU, 1958) and a PhD (University of Utah, 1967).[1][2]
Peterson became a college-level teacher of Utah history, the director of the Utah State Historical Society, and the editor of the Society's Utah Historical Quarterly. He was the author of Utah: A Bicentennial History, a sociopolitical history of Utah published in 1977.[1] He died in St. George, Utah in 2017.[2]
