Utah Stories from the Beehive Archive

Browse Items (113 total)

  • Tags: Culture

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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.Salt Lake City native Maude Adams was the highest paid and most beloved American…

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Barred from lucrative work and hounded by local residents, it took years of discrimination against Chinese workers to erase their contributions to Park City.All that remains of Park City’s once-thriving Chinatown is a name on a parking garage:…

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Meet AnnaBelle Weakley – known as the “Queen of 25th Street” – and learn how her entrepreneurial instinct and civic spirit transformed her Ogden community.During the mid-twentieth century, there was no railroad hub in Utah busier than Ogden,…

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Meet Howard Coleman, who came West with the railroad and built a better life – one job at a time.Like many of us, Howard Coleman used his work as a stepping stone to a better life.  As a black man and the son of a Kentucky share-cropper, his…

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From ancient times to today, the harvest and preparation of food has been tough work, especially in the arid deserts of the Great Basin. Learn how Paiute families did that work together in order to feed and foster their communities.Throughout Utah,…

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Have you ever seen a wildfire exploding up a mountain or heard one roaring through a forest? For Northern Ute Indian Firefighters, that was just another day at work.As a kid, Gina Sixkiller remembered her father smelling like fire.  "I used to think…

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Did you know that before Prohibition, Utah was home to fifteen breweries? Some were among the biggest and best in the West. Learn about Utah’s early beer brewers and their specialized craft.Ask any beer brewer – or any beer connoisseur – and…

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Utah’s romance with the movie industry began in the 1920s silent film era and hasn’t diminished since. Nearly a thousand motion pictures and television series have filmed in Utah, bringing millions each year to the state. Learn how Hollywood…

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Long work hours and blurry lines between personal and professional lives is hardly a modern dilemma. But imagine if your employer controlled not just your hours and your paycheck, but where you spent your off hours and how you spent your money.…

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Learn how one family went literally from “bags to riches” and how a son honored his mother’s legacy by naming after her one of Salt Lake’s most noted buildings.When Izzi Wagner lost his father, he was just sixteen. Life was hard for his…

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Much has been made of the early Mormons’ communal work ethic and the effective redistribution of resources within their communities. But how did they actually organize these efforts?Life on the eastern edge of the Great Basin was not easy.  When…

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Learn about Utah’s nineteenth century midwives, who were unusual in that they were actually paid for their work as medical providers. Much of the work that sustained Utah’s communities in the late nineteenth century was done by women, in the…

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The Mexican Mural Renaissance is one of the most famous art movements in modern history. Learn how a blond-haired, blued-eyed, 20-year-old from Salt Lake City became a Mexican Muralist.  In 1924, Utah judge Edward Higgins put his twenty-year-old…

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A lot of Americans still dream of the American West as a place of freedom and opportunity. But for workers at the turn of the twentieth century, it was never quite that simple.As author Mark Twain brings Huckleberry Finn’s story to a close, we read…

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Rafael Lopez came to Utah to help break a strike up in Bingham Canyon in 1912. A year later, he was a fugitive ­– and a folk hero.When Greek miners went out on strike in 1912, the Utah Copper Company turned to Mexican labor to keep production…

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We no longer work as close to the land as Utah’s indigenous people once did. But that doesn’t mean we don’t work for the same reasons. Learn how Timpanogos Utes made a living and how we might relate.We sometimes forget how much work was – and…

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Learn about a variety of jobs done by Utahns at the turn of the twentieth century, and think about how jobs have changed - or not - over the last 100 years.According to the United States Census, there were 73,840 men and 10,764 women employed in Utah…

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Learn about the forced relocation of Ute people from lush central Utah to the remote Uinta Basin.  In the mid-19th Century federal Indian policy shifted from Indian Removal toward the reservation system.  The result for many Native groups,…

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Thousands of Japanese Americans were forced into exile in the Utah desert during World War II.   Two months after the December 1941 attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 mandating the…

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Chinese immigrant laborers built the railroad from California to Utah.   On May 10, 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads joined at Utah’s Promontory Point, completing the first transcontinental railroad system in the United…
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