History belongs to the people, Dean May reminds us, and must ultimately be accessible all. Based on his award-winning television series, Utah: A People's History provides a sweeping view of the state's past. From prehistory to present, May explains Utah as it is today and its promise for the future. The video series upon which this book is based is no longer available for sale.

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.

In time for the centennial of the United States’s entry into World War I, this collection of seventeen essays explores the war experience in Utah through multiple perspectives, from those of soldiers, nurses and ambulance drivers who experienced the horror of the conflict firsthand to those on the home front who were transformed by the war. Citizens supported the war financially, through service on councils of defense, with victory gardens, and by other means. Some of Utah’s Native Americans and at least one Episcopal bishop resisted the war. The terrible 1918–1919 flu pandemic impacted Utah and killed more victims around the world than those who died on the battlefields. There was a Red Scare and fight over United States participation in a League of Nations. These topics and more are explored, helping us understand the nature and complexity of the conflict and its impact on Utahns. 

To outsiders, the state of Utah often conjures many unsurprising stereotypes and images: Mormons, polygamy, large families, national parks, and skiing. Is there more to Utah and its residents than these generalizations? Few doubt that the religious institutions in Utah affect the state’s quality of life in many ways. But it is equally true that numerous features of the population are steadily and profoundly altering the very nature of Utah and its residents. This book describes the many fundamental demographic, social, and economic pressures that will likely alter the state’s path in the future.
Utah’s leading social scientists and population-related scholars draw on their specific areas of expertise and analyze Utah’s population using recent sources of data such as the 2000 U.S. Census. The chapters are organized into three broad topical sections: the foundations of Utah’s population (basic demographics), how the nature of the population affects our daily lives (quality of life issues), and the public policy challenges that will face Utah’s leaders (emerging issues).

Poverty Flat. Bearskin Gulch. Drunken Hollow. Soberville. Hogup Mountain. Lousy Jim Creek. Hey Hoe Canyon. Snake John Reef. Sob Rapids. Nipple Butte. Tooele. Laverskin. Skutumpah. All Utah toponyms, or place names. Where are they? What is their history? Their importance? Are they, or where they populated? Do they exist today? And always, The name. how did they get it? Who provided it? When? What does it mean? Is Centerville in the center, and of what? Was Notom named for a rejected suitor?

John W. Van Cott has spend the better part of a lifetime searching out the answers to these questions. Now the fruits of his labor are recorded in this, the most extensive compilation of Utah place names ever published. Almost five thousand toponyms are listed alphabetically, marking the passage of peoples and cultures from earliest times. Specialists will appreciate the geographical precision of Section, Township, Range, and altitude. Generalists will recognize counties and relationships to know features. All will delight in the rich lore, often a mixture of myth and history, of the place and its name. Scholars will find useful the inclusion of synonyms, nicknames, previous names, all cross-referenced, and all tied to a bibliography of over five hundred entries.

The author concluded his work of over forty years with the observation that he hardly touched the surface of Utah’s place names, numbered at over twenty-two thousand by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Most Utahns are familiar with the Uinta Mountains, but few realize that the range has twenty-one peaks above 13,000 feet, some of them still unnamed. The elevation, challenging terrain and weather, solitude, and beautiful setting in Utah’s largest wilderness area make climbing these peaks a particularly rewarding experience. Better yet, in the summer and early fall every one of them can be climbed by a reasonably fit hiker without rope or climbing gear.

This guide provides detailed topographical maps and information on trailheads, access and summit routes with difficulty ratings, camp locations, estimated hiking times, weather, advice, and brief facts about geology and the history of the wilderness area. It also includes over fifty photographs of this breathtaking country.

Although Utah is a land of outdoor wonders, the state has a distressing air pollution problem. In some areas like Salt Lake City, geography exacerbates the issue; air quality in the Wasatch Front metropolitan region often ranks among the worst in the nation.
 
Utah’s Air Quality Issues: Problems and Solutions is the first book to tackle the subject.  Written by scholars in a variety of fields, including chemical engineering, economics, atmospheric science, health care, law, parks and recreation and public policy, the book provides a one-stop resource on the causes, impacts, and possible solutions to the state’s air quality dilemma. This volume is a must read for anyone wanting to understand Utah’s air pollution problem and what can be done about it.

"On Sunday 9 April 1865, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s brick home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, to negotiate the conclusion of the Civil War. That same day, far to the west, a handful of Mormons and northern Utes met in the central Utah town of Manti in an attempt to achieve a peace of their own. Unlike the negotiations at Appomattox, however, those in Manti failed, and the events that transpired there are viewed as the beginning of Utah’s Black Hawk War, the longest and most serious Indian-white conflict in Utah history."
—From the book

So begins the story of Black Hawk, Ute Indian warrior chief and brilliant strategist, and Brigham Young, sagacious religious and political leader of the Mormons. Two powerful and unyielding men forged by hardship and conviction, both revered and both reviled in their times. One, orchestrating a remarkable campaign to turn back the tide of white expansion and prevent the extinction of his people, the other, attempting to keep his exiled church and its thriving utopian society sovereign and intact. Two men of distinct races, beliefs, and cultures, but sharing a determination to keep U.S. soldiers out of their bloody conflict for control of land and other resources in the Utah territory.

From 1865 to 1867, the warrior Black Hawk, also known as Antonga, led a combined force of Utes, Navajos, and Paiutes in a series of intense stock raids on the Mormon settlements in Utah territory. Black Hawk astutely judged that political conflict between the federal government and Mormon Utah would keep U.S. soldiers from chastising his band. Moreover, the antagonism of Washington toward Utah’s polygamy, theocracy, and isolationism made Mormon leader Brigham Young wary of seeking federal help. In fact, to keep the government from using the war as a pretext for sending more troops to Utah, the Mormons withheld information, making the Black Hawk War an almost secret war as far as the rest of the nation was concerned. As directed by Brigham Young, Utah’s Latter-day Saint citizens mobilized a church militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to repel Indian attacks. Yet Black Hawk and others were able to carry on their activities for almost eight years without incurring the federal military reprisals that Indians on all four sides of the Mormon heartland experienced. Bloodshed on both sides plunged Mormons and Indians into a war of vengeance—years of killing and raiding that continued until federal troops stepped in 1872.

In this unprecedented volume, historian John Peterson provides the first comprehensive analysis of a unique and compelling chapter of western history and of the violent and protracted conflict it engendered. Utah’s Black Hawk War not only explores political intricacies and broader implications, scrutinizing the Mormons' Indian policies—most notably Brigham Young’s extraordinary "better to feed them than fight them" teachings—but also presents vivid narrative accounts of various raids and battles. The result is a masterfully researched and engagingly written account of Utah’s secret war, a war largely unknown among western history students, scholars, and enthusiasts—until now.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Francis M. and Emily S. Chipman Best First Book Award. 

Ethnologist Anne Smith lived and worked among the Utes in the 1930’s. During her work, she recorded Uinta, White River, and Uncompahgre tales from members of the last generation born in the preservation era.

These distinctive animal and human tales offer a rich source of Ute culture for anyone interested in the peoples of the Great Basin. The 102 stories here are ribald, sometimes violent, yet delicately balanced and full of humor. In addition to Smith’s transcriptions from Ute storytellers, Ute Tales contains photographs made in 1909 by Edward Sapir and in 1936 by Alden Hayes.