This collection surveys the many houses, residences, farms, and properties of Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon pioneers, first territorial governor of Utah, and second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The authors discuss, in addition to the buildings themselves, what went on within their walls, looking especially at the lives of Young's plural wives and their children. Their emphasis is on Young's residences as homes, not just structures. The text is heavily illustrated with photos, drawings and maps.

Alberta Henry (1920–2005) was born in a sharecropper’s shack in segregated Louisiana before moving with her family to Kansas where she grew up in a climate of hardship and hostile racial bigotry that forced second-class citizenship on African Americans.

Henry endured intolerance by leaning on her faith and her commitment to a cause that she believed God had called her to follow. When she came to Utah in 1949 she thought it would be a brief stay, but she ended up making it her home for more than fifty years. In Utah, Henry committed herself to helping all races, religions, and ethnic groups coexist in appreciation of each other. While Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X led the struggle for civil rights at a national level, Alberta Henry campaigned tirelessly for equality at a local level, talking at school board meetings, before city councils, and in the homes of her neighbors.

Henry was a member or officer of more than forty civic organizations and served for twelve years as president of the Salt Lake City branch of the NAACP, where she lobbied for civil rights, education, and justice. The dozens of awards and commendations she received speak to her accomplishments. While much of Henry’s story is told in her own words, Colleen Whitley provides expert and personal context to her speeches, writing, and interviews. The result is an exceptional first-person account of an African American woman leader and her role in the Civil Rights Movement in Utah. 

Mining had an enormous role, only partly measurable, in the history of Utah. Its multidimensional impact continues today. Economically, it made a major long-term contribution to the wealth, employment, and tax base of the state and stimulated a seemingly endless range of secondary businesses and enterprises. It helped shape the state's social history, determining the location, distribution, and composition of many communities and bringing transportation systems and a wide variety of institutions to them. It developed cultural diversity by drawing to Utah miners and families from otherwise underrepresented ethnic and national backgrounds. It ignited strife, particularly between labor and management, but those issues often spread into or connected with other conflicts in and between communities, classes, and factions. It influenced political platforms, generated candidates, and helped decide elections. Throughout the state, mining dramatically transformed the landscape, most obviously at what has been called the world's largest open-pit mine, which removed much of a mountain on the west side of Salt Lake Valley, but at innumerable other places too.

Despite all mining has done and meant, there has not been, until now, a book that surveyed its history in Utah. From the Ground Up fills that gap in a collection of essays by leading experts, among them historians Thomas G. Alexander, Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans, James E. Fell Jr., Laurence P. James, Brigham D. Madsen, Philip F. Notarianni, Allen Kent Powell, W. Paul Reeve, Raye C. Ringholz, and Janet Burton Seegmiller and geologists J. Wallace Gwynn and William T. Parry. The book is divided into three comprehensive parts. The first looks at "The Ground of Utah Mining": the geology that has produced extractable minerals, the economic history of the industry, "father of Utah mining" Patrick E. Connor, and the lore of mines and miners. Part II reviews the history of a handful of particularly significant mineral industries: salines, coal, uranium, and beryllium. The last part takes a region-by-region approach to survey the important, primarily for hard-rock mining, areas of the state, including places from Silver Reef to Alta, the East Tintic Range to the Uinta Basin, and Park City to Frisco.

A follow-up to the highly successful Worth Their Salt, published in 1996, Worth Their Salt, Too brings together a new set of biographies of women whose roles in Utah's history have not been fully recognized, despite their significance to the social and cultural matrix, past and present, of the state. These women-community and government leaders, activists, artists, writers, scholars, politicians, and others-made important contributions to the state's history and culture. Some of them had experiences that reveal new aspects of the state's history, while others simply led lives so interesting that their stories beg to be told. This new collection demonstrates, as Worth Their Salt did, the diversity of Utah's society and the many different roles women have played in it.