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Spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about the most slippery of subjects: their own families.
 
Historians have often been discouraged from writing about their relatives, subjects who are deemed too close for objective analysis. But new work by scholars interested in their own families raises fascinating questions about subjectivity—and how historians might put it to use. It also invites historians to abandon traditional aspects of academic writing and draw, instead, on literary forms more equipped to highlight the relationships between scholar and material, feeling and reason.
 
Scholars and Their Kin embraces diverse approaches to such writing, bringing into the open the personal, professional, and historiographic complexities that ensue when scholars write intimate yet self-aware histories about their families. The first book devoted to this genre, which editor Stéphane Gerson terms “personal family history,” this anthology features ten essays and an afterword by scholars working in this vein. The contributors—varied in their disciplines, themes, and nationalities—reflect on their motivations and methodological choices, the politics of family history, and the institutional constraints they have sometimes faced. Making full use of the creative possibilities of voice and form, they expand the literary ambitions of personal family history, provide readers with narrative models, and address questions of shame, responsibility, love, gendered and racial violence, family archives, as well as the tall tales, myths, misrepresentations, memories, and omissions that suffuse family lives. Scholars and Their Kin will interest historians, scholars in other disciplines, and readers interested in family histories that open broader worlds. 

According to an Akan proverb, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” This belief underlies historian Amy Tanner Thiriot’s work in Slavery in Zion, which combines genealogical and historical research to bring to light events and relationships unknown or misunderstood for well over a century. The total number of enslaved people in Utah’s early history has remained an open question for many years, due in part to the nature of nineteenth-century records, and an exact number is undetermined. But while writing this book Thiriot documented around one hundred enslaved or indentured Black men, women, and children in Utah Territory.
 
Slavery in Zion has two major parts. The first section provides an introductory history, chapters on southern and western experiences, and information on life after emancipation. The second section is a biographical encyclopedia of names, relationships, and events. Although Slavery in Zion contains material applicable to legal history and the history of race and Mormonism, its most important contribution is as an archive of the experiences of Utah’s enslaved Black people, at last making their stories an integral part of the record of Utah and the American West—no longer forgotten or written out of history.