The Grand Canyon—long recognized as one of North America’s premier natural wonders—has stirred human imagination and creativity, leaving an indelible mark on all who have encountered its spectacular vistas and intricate landscapes. Stories of the canyon’s early inhabitants to its modern day visitors are as varied and deep as the canyon’s cliffs.

In 1928 astronomer Edwin Hubble came to the canyon to test it as a site for the world’s greatest observatory. In the 1960s the Apollo astronauts hiked into the canyon to learn geology in preparation for lunar explorations. Famous writers and poets have looked to the canyon to find the meanings of nature and God. Dreamers turned a 1909 newspaper hoax into an elaborate myth about ancient Egyptian tombs in the canyon. Canyon of Dreams tells these and other stories, including that of Brighty the burro, who inspired a classic children’s novel, and the story of a teenaged Roger Miller, who spent a summer living in a trailer and “pushin’ broom” at the canyon, leading to his song “King of the Road.” Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s fight against the National Park Service to retain property he owned on the canyon rim is another illuminating tale. Despite being little known in the official annals of Grand Canyon history, the fight served as a pivotal moment in the much broader struggle between promoters of wilderness conquest and those advocating for preservation.

This eclectic compilation runs the gamut from the idiosyncratic to the landmark, the mythical to the empirical, and everything in between. The narratives are captivating and sure to appeal to readers interested in the Grand Canyon’s long and complex history. The work is thoroughly researched and will prove a valuable contribution to historical scholarship. Canyon of Dreams sheds light on many obscure aspects of the canyon and takes readers on rollicking adventures in the process.

An invaluable resource to anyone traversing the Escalante, this comprehensive guide details 43 hikes.

Publisher's Note: Realizing there are virtually no marked trails in the Escalante country (mostly canyons that wander and have many intersections, challenging anyone to write explicit description), this book includes directions to the trailhead, how to follow a particular route with choices of side canyons along the way, and occasional alternate endings. Some of the hikes may be appropriate for beginners. Some only the most experienced should attempt.

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument covers 1.7 million acres in southern Utah, offering the hiker an experience of deep solitude surrounded by a wealth of geological, biological, and archaeological treasures. Hiking the Escalante opens the door to exploration of this highly scenic area of meandering canyons with relatively few marked trails. It lists fifty hikes by degree of difficulty and includes directions to trailheads, instructions for how to follow particular routes, choices of side canyons along the way, suggestions for loop hikes, and occasional alternative endings. A detailed road log will guide you to each of four described sections. Along with hike descriptions, the book provides information on the geology, natural history, and human history of the area. This second edition contains seven new hikes, new photographs, and updated information about hike terrain. 

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized author of numerous collections of poetry and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. In Persuasion of Fall, the first prizewinning volume of the annual competition, Ann Lauinger celebrates the quotidian in ways that are wise, uncompromising, and sometimes sly in their playfulness.

American Indian English documents and examines the diversity of English in American Indian speech communities. It presents a convincing case for the fundamental influence of ancestral Native American languages on respective modern Indian English codes.

A distillation of over twenty years’ experience, William Leap’s pioneering work on the varieties of American Indian English explores the linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics of language use among Navajo, Hopi, Mojave, Ute, Tsimshian, Kotzebue, Ponca, Chilcotin, Seminole, Cherokee, and other American Indian tribes.

Unlike contemporary studies on schooling, ethnicity, empowerment, and educational failure, American Indian English avoids postmodernist jargon and discourse strategies in favor of direct description and commentary. Data are derived from real-life conditions faced by speakers of Indian English in various English-speaking settings. This practical focus enhances the book’s accessibility to Indian educators and community-based teachers, as well as non-Indian academics.

Massacres, raiding parties, ambush, pillage, scalping, captive taking: the things we know and sometimes dread to admit occur during times of war all happened in the prehistoric Southwest—and there is ample archaeological evidence. Not only did it occur, but the history of the ancient Southwest cannot be understood without noting the intensity and impact of this warfare.

Most people today, including many archaeologists, view the Pueblo people of the Southwest as historically peaceful, sedentary corn farmers. Our image of the Hopis and Zunis, for example, contrasts sharply with the more nomadic Apaches whose warfare and raiding abilities are legendary. In Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest Steven LeBlanc demonstrates that this picture of the ancient Puebloans is highly romanticized. Taking a pan-Southwestern view of the entire prehistoric and early historic time range and considering archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence and oral traditions, he presents a different picture.

War, not peace, was commonplace and deadly throughout the prehistoric sequence. Many sites were built as fortresses, communities were destroyed, and populations massacred. The well-known abandonments of much of the Southwest were warfare related. During the late prehistoric period fighting was particularly intense, and the structure of the historic pueblo societies was heavily influenced by warfare.

Objectively sought, evidence for war and its consequences is abundant. The people of the region fought for their survival and evolved their societies to meet the demands of conflict. Ultimately, LeBlanc asserts that the warfare can be understood in terms of climate change, population growth, and their consequences.

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 129

Swordfish Cave is a well-known rock art site located on Vandenberg Air Force Base in south central California. Named for the swordfish painted on its wall, the cave is a sacred Chumash site. It was under threat from various processes and required measures to conserve it. Nearly all of the cave’s interior was excavated to create a rock art viewing area. That effort revealed previously unknown rock art and made it possible to closely examine how early occupants used the space inside the cave. They identified three periods of human use, including an initial occupation around 3,550 years ago, an occupation about 660 years later, and a final Native American occupation that occurred much later, between A.D. 1787 and 1804. The discovery of tools used to make the pictographs linked the art to the two early occupations, pushing back the generally understood antiquity of rock art on California’s Central Coast by more than 2,000 years.
     Two aspects make this study unusual: datable materials associated with rock art and complete removal of cave deposits. Well illustrated with photographs, maps, and drawings of both the art itself and the excavations and materials revealed therein, the book presents a rare opportunity to directly link archaeology and rock art and to examine the spatial organization of prehistoric human habitation. 

Harold Leich set out on a westward journey in the summer of 1933. His travel narrative details his river trip down the Yellowstone River and the first descent by boat of the upper Colorado River from Grand Lake, Colorado, through Cataract Canyon, Utah. He was the first to push through this entire upper section, running rapids that had never known a paddle, rebuild­ing his kayak along the riverbanks, camping rough, and meeting ranchers and railroad workers in these remote regions. Leich’s sudden change of fortune in Cataract Canyon, in the most isolated part of Utah, and his soul searching as he worked his way out of a perilous situ­ation, will speak to anyone who has ventured beyond roads and trails and faced potential tragedy alone.

Alone on the Colorado takes readers on the adventure of running rivers and riding the rails, while painting a unique and optimistic portrait of Depression-era America. 

The structures of Chaco Canyon, built by native peoples between AD 850 and 1130, are among the most compelling ancient monuments on earth. Recognized as a World Heritage Site, these magnificent ruins are consistently featured in scholarly books and popular media. Yet, like Chaco itself, these buildings are anomalous in Southwestern archaeology and much debated.

In a century of study, our understanding and means of approaching these ruins have grown considerably. Important tree-ring dating, GIS research, and computer imaging point to the need for a new volume on Chaco architecture that unifies older information with the new.

The chapters in this volume focus on Chaco Great Houses and consider three overlapping themes: studies of technology and building types, analyses of architectural change, and readings of the built environment. To aid reconsideration there are over 150 maps, floor plans, elevations, and photos, including a number of color illustrations.

In recent times several “creation myths” have gained currency about how the United States government came to own and manage—for broad, mostly protective purposes—nearly one-third of the nation’s land. Controversies such as President Trump’s shrinking the boundaries of Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments and the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a ragtag militia group protesting U.S. ownership have brought these myths to the forefront, suggesting that public lands are a kind of centrifugal force driving Americans apart. Over the nation’s long history, however, the opposite has nearly always been the case. In this essay, John Leshy debunks the myths that have contributed to the often polarized character of contemporary discussions of public lands. Recounting numerous episodes throughout American history, he demonstrates how public lands have generally served to unify the country, not divide it. Steps to safeguard these lands for all to enjoy have almost always enjoyed wide, deep, bipartisan support. Leshy argues that America’s vast public lands are priceless assets, a huge success story, and a credit to the workings of our national government. But because these lands remain fully subject to the political process, each generation of Americans must effectively decide upon their future.
 
This lecture was presented on March 14, 2018, at the 23rd annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Salt Lake City’s oldest residential historic district is a neighborhood known as the Avenues. During the late nineteenth century this area was home to many of the most influential citizens of Salt Lake City. Built from 1860 until 1930, it contains a mix of middle and upper middle class homes of varying architectural styles. This architectural diversity makes the Avenues unique among Utah's historic districts. For the past thirty years, as citizens have rediscovered the value of living in historic properties near downtown and the University of Utah, preservation efforts have soared in the area.

In 1980, the Avenues was established as a historic district and the Utah Historical Society published The Avenues of Salt Lake City. That book’s authors, Karl T. Haglund and Philip F. Notarianni, gleaned much about the area’s history by using information found on the historic district applications. This newly revised edition of The Avenues of Salt Lake City by Cevan J. LeSieur updates the original with a greatly expanded section on the historic homes in the neighborhood, including more than 600 new photos, and additional material covering the history of the Avenues since 1980.

The book is designed so that readers can take it along as a guide when exploring the neighborhoods. All the pictures of Avenues homes are accompanied with architectural information and brief histories of the properties. This volume makes a valuable resource for those interested in the history of the Avenues and its diverse architecture, and for anyone interested in Utah history, Utah architecture, and historic preservation.
 

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

In 1915, the Ottoman government, then run by the Young Turks, deported most of its Armenian citizens from their eastern Anatolian lands. According to reliable estimates, close to forty percent of the prewar population perished, many in brutal massacres. Armenians call it the first genocide of the twentieth century. Turks speak of an instance of intercommunal warfare and wartime relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of their Armenian minority.

The voluminous literature on this tragic episode of World War I is characterized by acrimony and distortion in which both sides have simplified a complex historical reality and have resorted to partisan special pleading.

The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey examines the rich historical evidence without political preconceptions. Relying on archival materials as well as eye-witness testimony, Guenter Lewy avoids the sterile “was-it-genocide-or-not” debate and presents a detailed account of what actually happened. The result is a book that will open a new chapter in this contentious controversy and may help achieve a long-overdue reconciliation of Armenians and Turks.

The essays in this book, written over a span of some twenty years but updated for this publication, discuss episodes of mass murder that are often considered instances of genocide: the large-scale killing of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during World War I, the near-extinction of North America’s Indian population, the vicious persecution of the “Roma” or Gypsies under the Nazi regime. But in line with Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948, Lewy stresses the crucial importance of looking closely at the intent of the perpetrators. In contrast to the Holocaust, the killers in the atrocities mentioned above did not seek to destroy an entire people, and so, these three large-scale killings do not deserve the label of genocide.

Lewy argues that affirming the distinctiveness of the Holocaust does not deny, downgrade, or trivialize the suffering of other people. The crimes against the Ottoman Armenians, the American Indians, and the Gypsies—even if they did not reach the threshold of genocide—involved horrendous suffering and a massive loss of life. The genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda that took place in the second half of the twentieth century remind us that man’s inhumanity to man can take many forms and is not the special prerogative of any particular group. The last essay of the collection deals with the complications of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide. As the recent support of the Libyan rebels by NATO demonstrates, the issues raised here remain topical and controversial.

Historian and political scientist Guenter Lewy is no stranger to the topic of genocide nor to exploring controversial issues. His penchant for approaching topics from contentious angles continues in Outlawing Genocide Denial, as he scrutinizes the practice of criminalizing genocide denial.
 
Holocaust denial can be viewed as another form of hatred against the Jews and preventing it can be understood as a form of warding off hate speech. Germany has made it a crime punishable by law. Other European countries have similar laws. While the rationale for such laws seems reasonable, Lewy asks readers to look again and to consider carefully the dangers that these laws could present. His discussion neither dismisses the ramifications of genocide denial nor justifies it; he instead looks closely at the possible risks of government-enforced interpretations of history.
 
Outlawing genocide denial sets a precedent of allowing governments to dictate historical truth and how events should be interpreted. Such government restrictions can be counterproductive in a democratic society which values freedom of speech. Lewy examines these and related ideas through the analysis of historical and current examples. He posits his own conclusion but leaves it up to readers to view the evidence and arguments and form their own opinions.

Navajoland is the heart and soul of the American Southwest. While the Navajo Reservation incorporates portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, this is only about half the traditional homeland of 220,000 Diné, the People. In one way or another, nearly all of it, including the original homeland, is sacred to them. Before Spaniards and Americans affixed their own names to the land, every topographic feature had at least one Navajo name. Many of these made their way onto maps—in various forms—or are still in use among Navajo speakers.

Navajo Places is the most ambitious attempt yet to preserve this rich legacy. Through years of research, interviews, and consultation with Navajo authorities, Laurance Linford has compiled a place-name guide that goes beyond reservation boundaries to include the entirety of the traditional Navajo homeland. The volume contains over 1,200 entries, plus a pronunciation guide and sections on Navajo history and the relation of ritual and sacred legend to landscape.

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Four Corners region.

Tony Hillerman is beloved for his novels of intrigue in the American Southwest. In Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland, Laurance Linford takes readers on a journey through the Four Corners region to the haunts of Hillerman’s characters. Offered in encyclopedic form, each entry gives the common name of a particular location, the Navajo name and history, and a description of the location’s significance in various Hillerman novels. An understanding of the Navajo names and their relations to the landscape will lend a new dimension to the characters and events Tony Hillerman created.

AKA Glen Canyon Series Number 23. This study examines the pottery found on the Kaiparowits Plateau to try to answer questions about the relationships and movements of the Fremont, Virgin, and Anasazi peoples. 

Copublished with the Tanner Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library.

Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with fluctuations in the lake’s locally red, saline water.

The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson’s writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson’s many points of reference in creating it. Visitors and armchair travelers, too, will discover how much significance Smithson placed on regional considerations, his immersion in natural history, his passion for travel, and his ability to use diverse mediums to create a cohesive and lasting work of art. Containing some 220 images, most of them in color, with some historical black and whites, The  Spiral Jetty Encyclo lets readers explore the construction, connections, and significance of Smithson’s 1,500-foot-long curl into Great Salt Lake, created, in Smithson’s words, of “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.” 

Winner of 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.

There is still a pervasive notion that Indians did not inhabit the Yellowstone area. Drawing on the results of ongoing archaeological excavations and extensive ethnographic work among descendant native peoples, Mountain Spirit discusses the many groups that have in fact visited or lived in the area in prehistoric and historic times. In particular, the Shoshone group known as Tukudika, or Sheep Eaters, maintained a rich and abundant way of life closely related to their primary source of protein, the mountain sheep of the high-altitude Yellowstone area.

These robust people were talented artisans, making well-constructed shelters, powerful horn bows, and expertly tailored clothing that was highly sought by their trading partners. They moved in small, kin-based bands, accompanied by large dogs that were indispensable hunting and trekking companions. Moving seasonally through portions of the Beartooth, Absaroka, and Wind River ranges, the Sheep Eaters made skillful use of their environment.

Written for general readers, Mountain Spirit includes photographs, lithographs, and a number of color drawings and sketches of Sheep Eater life ways by Davíd Joaquin. It presents a vivid picture of the vanished way of life of a people whose accomplishments have been largely ignored in histories of Native peoples. 

Eighteen essays provide an accessible, entertaining look into a system of millennia-old legends and beliefs.

Mythology is one of the great creations of humankind. It forms the core of sacred books and reflects the deepest preoccupations of human beings, their most intimate secrets, their glories, and their infamies.

In 1990, Alfredo López Austin, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Mesoamerican thought, began a series of essays about mythology in the Mesoamerican tradition, published in México Indígena. Although his articles were written for general readers, they were also intended to engage specialists. They span a divers subject matter: myths and names, eclipses, stars, left and right, Méxican origins, Aztec incantations, animals, and the incorporation of Christian elements into the living mythologies of Mexico. The title essay relates the Mesoamerican myth explaining why there is a rabbit o the moon’s face to a Buddhist image and suggests the importance of the profound mythical concepts presented by each image.

The eighteen essays in this volume are unified by their basis in Mesoamerican tradition and provide an accessible, entertaining look into a system of millennia-old legends and beliefs.

Set aboard a ship carrying troops home from India at the end of World War II, Edward Lueders’ autobiographical novel opens with the dramatic events that ensue when the call goes out, 'Man overboard!' As the vessel drifts, engines stopped, in search of the lost man, the story begins to delve deeper into the paradox at the center of our lives, as irreducible isolation is juxtaposed with inevitable coexistence.

The ship becomes a complex metaphor for the thousands of men aboard and, by extension, for all of us who exist both as individuals and as parts of the human community. These motifs are developed through the interplay of three men aboard ship, Staff Sgt. LeRoy Warner, Sgt. Mark Reiter, and Sgt. Stanley Norman, who entertain troops as a jazz trio. These GI musicians improvise through solo sections in which each reflects hauntingly on his past and dreams of his future. As they search for meaning beyond subjectivism, beyond suffering and randomness, their music is about the possibilities for harmony.

Although miscues, counterbeats, and dissonance apparently mock our efforts to break out of ourselves, sometimes, however fleetingly, everything falls into place. Then the prose of our lives turns unexpectedly to poetry and we experience an exhilarating unity.

Writing Natural History is the edited record of four public dialogues held at the University of Utah in 1988 between eminent writers in the fields of natural history. In these interchanges the writers discussed their traditions, perspectives, values, purposes, techniques, and personal insights. Their conversations, like their work, link the sciences with the humanities in surprising ways, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of both. This volume maintains the vitality of the spoken dialogues and conveys a lively sense of each speaker’s concern with the processes of the natural world and our human position in it.

Half of the authors began as professionals in the natural sciences before becoming recognized for their literary skills; the other half are established writers whose works reflect their vital human affinity with and respect for nature. Writing Natural History will appeal to all readers involved in conservation, nature study, creative writing, environmental issues, the natural sciences, the outdoors, and the ecological politics of Earth.

Authors dialogues feature Barry Lopez and Edward O. Wilson, Robert Finch and Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Paul Nabhan and Ann Zwinger, Paul Brooks and Edward Lueders.

Winner of the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

“A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest.” Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.

In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna—and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction.

The early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is filled with fascinating characters, but few led a more tumultuous life than Amasa Lyman. Though he has been largely forgotten, this new biography provides a unique and revealing account of the early days of Mormonism and Lyman’s role in creating that history. He served as a missionary in the “burned-over” district of upstate New York and in Ohio before moving to Kirtland, where he suffered in the infant church’s financial crisis. He participated in the conflicts with hostile Missourians and emigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois. There, he became a leader in the church and a close associate of Joseph Smith. Lyman then led a company of pioneers across Iowa to Winter Quarters and on to the Salt Lake Valley. He was sent to the California gold fields and led the colonization of San Bernardino, where he became its first mayor, before returning to Utah, and he traveled to Europe as head of the church’s European missions.

Having spent more than thirty years in the service of his church, Lyman began to move away from its teachings after a series of conflicts with its second leader, Brigham Young. Lyman was one of the first Mormons to criticize the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which led to his dismissal as an apostle. He was excommunicated in 1870 and became one of the foremost spokesmen of the Godbeite Church of Zion movement before his death in 1877. Author Edward Leo Lyman chronicles Amasa Lyman’s life and interactions with Mormon history with an honesty true to his ancestor’s freethinking spirit.

Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Utah History Book Award from the Utah Division of State History. 

Many modern ecological problems such as rain forest destruction, decreasing marine harvests, and fire suppression are directly or indirectly anthropogenic. Zooarchaeology and Conservation Biology presents an argument that conservation biology and wildlife management cannot afford to ignore zooarchaeological research—the identification and analysis of faunal remains recovered from archaeological deposits. The editors contend that we can learn important lessons by studying long-term human and nonhuman influences on biota and ecosystems. From this perspective we can begin to understand biogeographic dynamics and behavioral patterns that are invisible to researchers who study living organisms over just a small span of years.

The focus of this volume is on the North American faunal record. Contributors identify a specific management or conservation issue, describe and analyze relevant zooarchaeological data, and offer recommendations or at least establish a baseline for possible resolution. The volume brings together both case studies and research about past ecosystems, and examines how such knowledge can be of current utility and relevance.

In many ways the opponents of wolves seem so much like the wolves themselves that it is wildly ironic: though their numbers are small, they seem to retain a core fierceness that cannot be ignored—nor would you want to, for fear is one of the most primal emotions of any place. It’s never going to go entirely away—not in a wild, healthy ecosystem.' —from 'The Feds' by Rick Bass

After roaming the desert Southwest for thousands of years, the Mexican gray wolf was, almost in the blink of an eye, driven to the brink of extinction. El Lobo collects writings that explore how this subspecies of wolf was brought so close to the edge of annihilation.

The first section, 'To the Brink,' includes essays that describe wolf biology, the campaign to exterminate wolves from the Southwest, and the wolf’s role in Native American cultures and in Mexican folklore. The second section, 'And Back,' illustrates a turnaround in attitudes and policy and includes Aldo Leopold’s famous essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain,' Rick Bass’s astute analysis of the political divide, and Sharman Apt Russell’s carefully woven plea in which she shares her experience with Pueblo Indian children meeting a wolf in their school auditorium. These essays, from both sides of the contested issue, resonate with passion, conviction, and the desire to save a world that is mightily at risk.