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Freak Smoking Ban Overturned
A massive public protest against a state smoking ban forced the Utah Legislature to overturn the law in 1923.Debates about the sale of cigarettes and smoking in public venues are hardly new to the Beehive State. In 1923, a determined crowd of Utah…
German and Italian Prisoners of War in Utah
Many people know about the Japanese internment camp Topaz, but Utah also held Italian and German prisoners of war during World War II.As World War II raged throughout Europe and Japan, captured enemy soldiers were sent to the United States and Utah…
Grace Oshita
The experiences of a young girl who lived in Utah’s Topaz Internment Camp.Shortly after the United States declared war on Japan following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Grace Oshita’s father was picked up by the FBI and detained as a suspected…
Gus Faust - American Doughboy
Utah sent thousands of infantrymen into World War I where they faced unimaginable conditions on the battlefield. But when the war ended, the battle continued at home, where returning soldiers faced a changing economy, uncertain job prospects, and a…
Harry’s Dream: Beaver Mountain Ski Resort
Like many Utahns, Harold Seeholzer loved snow and skiing. But how did his enthusiasm for outdoor recreation turn into one of Cache Valley’s most notable ski resorts?In the late 1930s, Harold and a few local ski fanatics engineered the first…
Helen Zeese Papanikolas
A famous historian used her girlhood memories of Carbon County to completely change the way we understand Utah’s past.She passed away in 2004, but Helen Zeese Papanikolas is still revered in Utah as an historian whose work made it impossible to…
Historic Copperton
Historic Copperton is a tiny town that defied the boom-bust cycle typical of mining towns.The commercial mining industry has driven Utah’s economic, political, and social development. Most towns associated with the mining industry went through…
Hollywood Puts Utah to Work
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…
Howard Coleman: Stepping Stones to a Better Life
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…
It's a Bird! It's a Plane!
Airplanes played a pivotal role in attracting tourism to one southern Utah town. On September 27, 1920 the first airplane cast its shadow over Cedar City, Utah. Who was flying it? And why were they flying there? In the early 1920s,…
Japanese Fire Balloons Reach Utah During WWII
The Japanese bombing of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II in 1941. But one of the best-kept secrets of the War was a Japanese air offensive on the US mainland using fire balloon bombs, some of which actually reached…
Joseph Hansen: Right-Hand Man of Leon Trotsky
The 1940 assassination in Mexico City of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky has an odd Utah connection in Joseph Hansen, whose journey took him from a childhood in Richfield, Utah, to the deathbed of one of the most important leaders of the 20th…
Keetley Farms
Keetley Farm was an agricultural settlement for Japanese Americans during World War II.Many Utahns know the story of the internment camps built to imprison Japanese Americans during World War Two. Utah was even home to one such camp at Topaz in…
Labor Rationing in Utah’s Depression Economy
Meet Barney Flanagan and learn how it fell to him to keep corruption out of government-funded work-relief jobs in Utah during the early years of the Great Depression.When you hear about shortages during the Great Depression, you probably imagine…
Law of the River: Conflicts & Legacies
In 1922, Utah joined the Colorado River Compact as arid Western states started to scramble for equal access to the waters of the Colorado River. But taming nature with this legal agreement did not come... naturally.
In 1922, seven states in the…
Law of the River: The 1922 Colorado Compact
Maybe you’ve heard it before: “The Nile is the longest river in the world. The Amazon is the largest. But the Colorado is one of the hardest working.” Learn why.
Did you know a quarter of Utah’s water comes from one river? That river is the…
Legacy of the Wagner Bag Company
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…
Linwood: the Town that Drowned
Every summer, thousands of people flee to the cool waters of Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah’s northeast corner. But few of them would know about the little town of Linwood buried beneath the water’s surface.Linwood grew near the confluence of…
Marriner Eccles
The career of the Utahn who led the Federal Reserve Board through some of the darkest days of the Great Depression.With the Federal Reserve System so much in the news these days, let’s take a look at the Utahn Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated to…
Masashi Goto
The wreckage of a plane and the body of its young pilot was found in the Uinta Mountains in 1929.On July 8, 1929 Nymphus Simmons, a sheepherder, found wreckage of a plane and the body of a young man in Dry Canyon near Soapstone Basin in the Uinta…