Learn about Utah’s convict labor system and how prisoners actually formed the backbone of some of our early public works projects – especially road construction.

The creation of the Spanish Speaking Organization for Community, Integrity, and Opportunity in Salt Lake City sought to identify problems of the Spanish-speaking minority. This group worked on behalf of the community to improve equality and access to opportunity in Utah.

The story of an ambitious and successful young woman who lived in polygamy.

Mormon women wrote and published a newspaper for and about Mormon women. The paper had a small circulation and was replaced with the Relief Society Magazine shortly after the newspaper declined. 

After Elizabeth Wood Kane arrived in Utah with her husband, her letters home became the manuscript for a book about Utah culture. Her writings shed some important light on the frontier and Mormon social customs. 

The early political history of Utah women began with the 1870 law that gave women the right to vote. 

 Female Methodist missionaries in Utah forged relationships with women across religious lines, protecting and advocating for women in need throughout the state. 

Voters from Utah went crazy for Democratic presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896. 

The presence of the Ku Klux Klan was not just limited to the southern United States. In fact, the KKK had grown enough to march through the streets of Salt Lake City in the early 1920s.

The old Hotel Utah has a storied history of hospitality that is shadowed by the racial prejudice common throughout Utah right into the 1960s.