Utah Stories from the Beehive Archive

Thousands of Japanese Americans were forced into exile in the Utah desert during World War II.  

The captivating and controversial past of Salt Lake City’s old Ambassador Club.

A key figure in the struggle over polygamy was US Supreme Court Justice Charles Zane. His tenure on the bench saw hundreds of people convicted of illegal cohabitation or polygamy, leading some to call his work an “antipolygamy crusade”.

Celebrations of the Chinese Lunar New Year have riveted Utahns since 1869.

In 2011 Utah state lawmakers voted to designate the Browning M1911 pistol as the official state firearm. The gun would be the latest addition to a surprising collection of historic state symbols.

The murder of Greek labor agent, George Demetrakopolous, and the hunt for his killer in 1908.

The Utah History Fair is an academic program that has been getting Utah kids excited about history for thirty years.

Despite Utah’s lack of direct involvement in the Civil War, they played a key role in the interests of leaders in Washington over the struggle for control of the western territories.

Learn why the US Congress had a problem in 1850, and how its solution led to the creation, 160 years ago this month, of a place called Utah.

Women in the southern Utah town of Kanab made history- and a difference- in 1912. The entire town board was comprised of women, and their agenda was to make Kanab a better place to live.

Keetley Farm was an agricultural settlement for Japanese Americans during World War II.

The anti-war movement came to Salt Lake City in 1969, culminating in a rally that the Salt Lake Tribune called “the largest peace demonstration in Utah history.”

Meet AnnaBelle Weakley – known as the “Queen of 25th Street” – and learn how her entrepreneurial instinct and civic spirit transformed her Ogden community.

In 1899, Ramon Gonzalez, his wife Guadalupe, and his children Romana and Prudencio, left their home in Dixon, New Mexico, to settle in Monticello, Utah. A wagon carried all their household possessions, while a few head of livestock followed on the hoof. 

The federal termination and restoration of the lands of the Paiute Indian Tribe illustrate the complicated relationship between state, federal, and tribal claims to land.

Manuelito was one of the last Navajo leaders to surrender to the US military in the late 1860s.

Kanosh, a leader of the Pahvant Utes, used negotiation with white settlers to ensure the survival of his people.

Utah’s history of anti-liquor laws began before Prohibition in the United States.

A bizarre political moment in Utah's long trek towards statehood exposes the tension between politics and religion in the Deseret. 

Nearly 600 enlisted African American soldiers and their families migrated to Salt Lake City in 1896. These soldiers discovered that Utahns’ attitudes towards African Americans were much like the rest of the country, and faced racial discrimination during their time in Utah.

This week, learn how the most famous American theater actress of the early 20th Century used gender-bending roles to push the early boundaries of a queer aesthetic.

The fourth governor of the state, Simon Bamberger, was Utah’s first non-Mormon and only Jewish governor.

The experiences of a young girl who lived in Utah’s Topaz Internment Camp.

Plum Alley, a narrow lane in downtown Salt Lake City, marks what used to be the heart of a vibrant Chinatown.

A small area of downtown Salt Lake City used to be “Japan Town”, an area that served as the focus of the city’s Japanese American community. The area was demolished in the 1960s in order to make room for the Salt Palace.

Chinese immigrant laborers built the railroad from California to Utah.  

Joe Hill has become a deeply ingrained part of Utah folklore. The Wobbly songwriter was executed for murder in the state in the early 1900s.

Many people know about the Japanese internment camp Topaz, but Utah also held Italian and German prisoners of war during World War II.

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.

In the mid-nineteen eighties, global pressure was mounting against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Learn how persistent student activists at the University of Utah forced their campus to confront its connections to an oppressive regime half a world away.

Welsh immigrants brought with them valuable skills that laid the foundation for Utah’s early mining industry.