Who Tells Your Story? Analyzing a Century of Utah History

Abstract

Much of historical research relies on the close reading of diaries, letters, and other primary sources. But this is not the only way to approach historical materials. A different method that has gained popularity in recent years is known as “distant reading,” a computational approach to extracting broader generalizations from large corpora of texts. Distant reading can take many forms, such as text mining, network analysis, or mapping. These approaches, as Ted Underwood argues, can help us understand the “longer arcs of change [that] have been hidden from us by their sheer scale.” It can help us see the “curvature of the earth” beyond the “mountains and political boundaries” that often preoccupy our attention.1 At times, distant reading can help confirm—perhaps with a greater degree of precision—what we have already inferred through more qualitative approaches to research. At other times, it can help uncover trends that we had not previously noticed due to increased scales of analysis.In this essay, we use quantitative methods to explore some broad trends in Utah historiography as seen through the state historical journal Utah Historical Quarterly (hereafter UHQ). Utah historiography encompasses much more than just UHQ. But as a key publication for the Utah State Historical Society, the quarterly has nevertheless been a central component of how the history of Utah has been told. Our assumption is, therefore, that UHQ reflects many of the broader trends in Utah history. Those familiar with Utah history and Utah historiography likely will not be too surprised by our findings, especially our confirmation that the writing of Utah history has tended to focus on white Mormon men. However, by outlining some of the “longer arcs of change” in Utah history, we hope this distant reading of UHQ will provide some additional data points in the ongoing conversation regarding the past, present, and future of writing Utah history.Data for this project consists of journal articles published in Utah Historical Quarterly from 1928 to 2021 as hosted on the Issuu platform.2 This platform has its peculiarities and occasional errors in the way that it divided up the journal into individual articles and extracted text from the scanned images (a process known as Optical Character Recognition). One such example is that it often lumps all book reviews into one file rather than separating into individual reviews as found on other platforms such as JSTOR. Despite these problems, we have found that Issuu categorized correctly the majority of research articles and reprints of primary sources (e.g. diaries) originally published in UHQ. As such, we ultimately removed book reviews from our analysis and instead focused on research articles and primary sources. In total, this included 1,433 individual articles, 839 different authors, and over 8 million total words. The text length (which excludes book reviews) has fluctuated somewhat over time but remained relatively stable from the 1960s to the 2000s at around 100,000 words per year before increasing from 2016 to the present to around 150,000 words per year (see fig. 1).This paper begins by discussing the intellectual contributions of UHQ and by situating the quarterly within its respective intellectual communities. By looking at authorship and citation data, we find that UHQ has retained its strongest connections to the overlapping field of Mormon studies, although it does retain a (weaker) connection to western American history. Building on this, we then explore how this strong connection to Mormon studies has shaped the types of stories that have been told in the pages of the quarterly. By extracting time data, for example, we show how the quarterly has focused (with a few exceptions) on the history of the region after the arrival of Mormon pioneers in 1847. We also look at the frequency with which historical figures appear in the pages of UHQ to show that the most frequently referenced individuals have tended to be prominent leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By looking at the gender composition of these historical figures, we further show how women have been historically underrepresented in the quarterly. UHQ has a long tradition of printing social histories of Utah's diverse racial and ethnic groups, but we do find that coverage has varied over time, and some groups remain underrepresented. To conclude, we explore how archives and authorship have potentially impacted the types of histories published in the quarterly.Over the years, Utah Historical Quarterly has been a part of multiple intellectual communities. Established in 1928, the quarterly emerged out of a historical society where, upon its organization in 1897, “Utahns—mostly white Mormons, proud of their heritage—sought to commemorate their past.”3 Given this, the history of UHQ, especially in the early years, reflected general trends in Mormon historiography, including the perpetuation of a pioneer myth “master narrative” and the compilation and publication of historical records. By midcentury, however, the quarterly began to be elevated by figures such as Dale L. Morgan and A. Russell Mortensen who sought to expand the cultural and political boundaries of Utah by promoting more interpretive essays that situated Utah's past within the larger context of the American West. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, we find articles that either attempted to situate Utah history in that context or adopted an expansive view of Utah history that extended beyond its political boundaries. This is reflected in titles such as “Temple Square: The Crossroads of the West” (1959), “The Kern Brothers and the Image of the West” (1960), “State Action in Relation to Preservation of Historical Resources in the Expanding West” (1961), and “Supply Hub of the West: Defense Depot Ogden, 1941–1964” (1964). This trend continued into the 1960s and early 1970s and coincided with the growth of the Western Historical Association, which had been established in 1961. Beginning in 1970, the association established its flagship journal, Western Historical Quarterly (hereafter WHQ), which was produced and published by Utah State University's Department of History until 2015. USU professor Leonard J. Arrington, who by 1970 had already published two dozen articles in UHQ, was asked to serve as the first editor of WHQ.4The cross-fertilization between Utah and western American history can be further seen in the number of scholars publishing in both UHQ and WHQ over the past half-century. Since 1970, at least sixty-five scholars have published in both venues. However, it is important to point out that with only a few exceptions, most authors tended to publish their research in one venue more than the other. One of the most frequently published authors in UHQ, for example, is Thomas G. Alexander who published more than twenty articles in UHQ but only a couple in WHQ. We also find the reverse trend, where a handful of prominent U.S. West historians only contributed one or two articles to UHQ, including scholars such as Maria E. Montoya, Richard Etulain, Howard R. Lamar, Michael Lansing, and David Rich Lewis. Despite early ties, the lack of a more sustained connection between UHQ and WHQ was likely the product of specialization that has taken place within the discipline of history since the 1970s. The results of the professionalization of UHQ, according to Jedediah Rogers, “was that while the journal became more professional and scholarly it also began to constrict, as the discipline became cast into silos. Consequently, state history's association became more local than regional.” Over time, Utah history has become “a stepchild of Western history.”5This trend toward the local in Utah history has had a more complicated relationship with the overlapping field of Mormon studies. In the postwar years of the quarterly, the traditional mythologizing of the Utah and Mormon past gave way to a more professionalized approach as exemplified in the publication of historians such as Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington. Origin stories for what has come to be known as the “New Mormon History” often point to the publication of seminal works such as Juanita Brooks's The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950 or Leonard Arrington's Great Basin Kingdom in 1958. Richard Saunders has pushed this dating back even further to Dale Morgan's “The State of Deseret,” published in three successive issues of Utah Historical Quarterly in 1940.6 Debates regarding the origins and novelty of the New Mormon History aside, it is clear that the Utah Historical Quarterly served as an important venue over the years for many scholars associated with this new trend in writing about the Mormon past.This connection between UHQ and Mormon history continued after the establishment of the Mormon History Association in 1965 and the publication of the Journal of Mormon History (hereafter JMH) beginning in 1974. For example, since the beginning of JMH, there has remained a fairly strong connection between the two journals with at least 118 scholars publishing in both JMH and UHQ. Collectively, these scholars have published at least 436 articles in JMH and 383 in UHQ. To put this in context, the sixty-five authors who published in both UHQ and WHQ only published 105 articles in WHQ and 176 articles in UHQ. This stronger and more balanced connection between Utah history and Mormon history is further represented by prominent figures who have frequently published in both venues, including Leonard J. Arrington, Thomas G. Alexander, William P. MacKinnon, Jessie L. Embry, and James B. Allen. Many of these scholars would also publish in WHQ, but not nearly as consistently as in the other two journals.Another way to position the quarterly within its broader intellectual context is to look at citations of articles published in the quarterly. Google Scholar lists that 196 UHQ articles have been cited 1,267 times in 973 different publications.7 Roughly half of all citations come from other journal articles (625 out of 1,267), one-fourth come from theses and dissertations (295), and another fourth from books (291) and book chapters (39). The remaining citations include court cases (7), various government and environmental reports (6), websites (3), and published speeches (1). UHQ citations appear to be increasing over time (see fig. 2), although this could also be due to Google Scholar's bias towards more recent publications. It could also be because the quarterly didn't appear on national databases/platforms until UHQ editors placed it on JSTOR in 2018. Prior to then, the publication was undoubtedly more difficult for scholars and researchers outside of the region to find. There is a good deal of variation between when a given article is published and when it is cited. The most frequently cited articles were published between the 1940s and 1970s, with on average a roughly thirty-year gap between publication and citation (mean: 33.6 years; median: 32 years; sd: 21.7 years).8Citation data underscores the broad intellectual impact that the quarterly has had on multiple academic fields. UHQ articles have been cited by over 150 different academic journals in the fields of history, folklore studies, anthropology, law, marketing, environmental sciences, biology, genetics, epidemiology, and more. A closer look at which journals are frequently citing the quarterly further highlights UHQ's strong connection to Mormon studies. The journals most frequently citing UHQ include JMH (59 citations), Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (46 citations), and BYU Studies (37 citations). The connection to western American history exists, with multiple citations from WHQ (11 citations) and Pacific Historical Review (13 citations), but Mormon studies journals are nearly six times more likely to cite UHQ articles than U.S. West history journals are.The overall range of engagement with the quarterly has evolved over time. If we split up citation data based on the year that the UHQ article was published and which journals were citing it, we still find that Mormon studies journals such as JMH, Dialogue, and BYU Studies are consistently at the top of the list. Western American history journals tend to appear next on the list, but we are again talking about far fewer citations overall than Mormon studies publications. This is even the case when looking at some of the earliest articles published in UHQ from 1928 to 1949, which makes sense given the context within which the quarterly emerged. Interestingly, the period of professionalization at midcentury and the drive to frame Utah history in the context of the West led to the publication of articles that have a more diverse network than in preceding decades, including several journals outside the field of history. Given the average thirty-year lag between publication and citation, it remains to be seen which scholars will engage with UHQ articles published in recent decades. But available data suggests that the quarterly will remain diverse while also retaining a strong connection to Mormon studies. One notable data point is that the Journal of American History appears fourth on the list (behind JMH, BYU Studies, and Dialogue) for recent UHQ citations, a promising sign for the quarterly's engagement with the broader field of American history.While it is difficult to quantify, our overall impression is that articles that center on the Mormon experience in Utah tend to have a somewhat smaller but more centralized citation network (e.g., JMH, Dialogue, BYU Studies), whereas articles that are centered less on Mormonism and Mormon themes tend to have a larger but less centralized citation network.9 In other words, scholars publishing Mormon-centered content in UHQ are writing within a more concrete community of scholars, of which UHQ is one of several publication venues. Conversely, scholars publishing articles in UHQ on non-Mormon themes are writing within a less tangible but potentially more expansive community of scholars, including outside the field of history.Looking beyond journal articles, UHQ has also had an important impact on undergraduate and graduate education. Students writing theses and dissertations at Brigham Young University (39 students), University of Utah (24 students), and Utah State University (20 students) are most likely to cite articles published in the quarterly. But beyond these three, citations have come from students researching at 80 different institutions. These institutions are primarily scattered throughout the United States, but a smaller number were located in Canada, Europe, and Asia. Additionally, over a hundred different book publishers have printed books that cite the quarterly, most notably Utah State University Press, University of Oklahoma Press, University of Illinois Press, University of Nebraska Press, Routledge, and University of Utah Press.Overall, UHQ has had and continues to have an impact on multiple intellectual communities. The quarterly's identity as a local history journal has fluctuated over the years, but over the past half century, it has tended to lean strongly towards Mormon studies and to a lesser degree the U.S. West. But its reach goes far beyond Mormon studies and even history as a field of study. The documenting of various aspects of local history has extended its reach to the social and natural sciences, law, marketing, medicine, legal cases, and environmental reports.In recent years, the quarterly's editorial statement, published inside the front cover of each issue, has once again emphasized its desire to “publish articles on all aspects of Utah history, as well as to present Utah in the context of the West.” Reminiscent of midcentury efforts led by figures such as Dale Morgan, the statement further states that UHQ “challenges readers and authors to think across state lines to the forces of history, physiography, and culture that link Utah to a host of people, places, experiences, and trends beyond its geopolitical boundaries. UHQ seeks a regional approach, reflecting Utah's geographic and cultural position at the crossroads of the West.” It remains to be seen how these internal attempts to shift towards a more regional approach will shape the future of the quarterly and its engagement with academia and the broader public. Increased citations from the Journal of American History are a promising sign. But as we will see more below, the quarterly's close ties to the field of Mormon studies is in large part a product of its predominate focus on the Mormon experience in Utah.Given the context in which Utah Historical Quarterly emerged, along with its close ties to Mormon studies, the quarterly has tended to exhibit a strong Mormon orientation. One way to get at this is to explore the “when” of Utah history. Here we used a method known as Named-Entity Recognition (using the spaCy package in Python) that locates and classifies different elements of text into categories such as time expressions, locations, and even person names. The time expressions studied here might include phrases such as “In 1847” or “On the evening of November 20, 1894,” from which we extracted references to specific years (i.e. 1847 and 1894).10 In total, we were able to locate 58,000 time references from which we then plotted the frequency each year appears throughout UHQ (see fig. 3). The results reveal how the quarterly has primarily focused on the history of the region after the arrival of the Mormon pioneers. Specifically, 93.5 percent of time references took place on or after 1847. Additionally, 42.5 percent of references occurred between the arrival of Mormon settlers in 1847 and Utah gaining statehood in 1896. The only year frequently mentioned before the nineteenth century is 1776, the year of Domínguez and Escalante's famous expedition.Looking beyond overall counts, the general trend has (unsurprisingly) been that more recent publications tend to focus on more recent events in history. If we look at time references in the quarterly by decade of publication, for example, the median year has steadily increased from 1861 in 1930–1940 to 1917 by 2010–2020. This trend has been good for postwar histories of Utah. When looking at the full dataset, post-1945 dates are naturally lacking given that the quarterly began publication in the 1920s. But if we look at published articles since 2000, roughly 31 percent of all referenced dates occurred on or after 1945, an increase from only 19 percent when looking at the entire dataset. However, this overall trend towards more recent dates, as well as a general decline in scholarly attention to the fur trade period of western history, has in many ways furthered the perception that Utah history began after the arrival of Mormon settlers in 1847. While 6.5 percent of time references in the full database referred to years before 1847, this has declined to just 3 percent since 2000.Related to the “when” of Utah history is the question of “who.” To understand this, we again used Named-Entity Recognition to extract a list of unique person names that appear on the pages of UHQ and then counted how frequently they appear. After cleaning the data, we were left with around 6,200 unique names that we then sorted based on frequency.11 A couple of trends emerged regarding representation in Utah history. Our concept of representation is simply that publications about Utah's past should reflect the diverse people who have lived there. This might seem like an unrealistic expectation given that so much of history is framed through the lens of prominent political and religious figures who are predominately white men. We echo the desire of the current editors of UHQ to include more histories of underrepresented groups by underrepresented authors, but our intent here isn't to proscribe a set of criteria for what is acceptable or unacceptable forms of history, especially given that representation will look very different depending on the topic of study. Nevertheless, we hope that quantifying some of the more obvious signals of (under)representation will contribute to ongoing discussions regarding what it means to write representative histories of Utah.12When looking at the most frequently mentioned historical figures, we found several different categories of people. The largest category was prominent individuals in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, the top ten figures on the list fall into this group. Brigham Young is at the top with 4,110 references, followed by Joseph Smith (734 references), George A. Smith (284), John Taylor (283), Reed Smoot (282), Wilford Woodruff (276), Joseph F. Smith (263), George Q. Cannon (249), Jacob Hamblin (228), and John D. Lee (219). Outside of this group, we also find frequent references to well-known frontiersmen and explorers of the Utah region, such as John Wesley Powell (162 references), Jedediah Smith (109), Jim Bridger (67), and Kit Carson (63). Another category is government officials, including presidents of the United States like James Buchanan (151 references), Theodore Roosevelt (98), Abraham Lincoln (87), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (86), as well as Utah politicians like Simon Bamberger (69 references) and William Spry (63). A final category includes historians like Leonard Arrington (123 references), Dale Morgan (103), Juanita Brooks (94), Andrew Jenson (76), and Wallace Stegner (57).While these different categories reveal a degree of diversity in the telling of Utah history, the overall strong Mormon focus is undeniable. For one, Brigham Young is mentioned at least once in just over half of all articles (745 out of 1,433 articles or 51.9 percent). This doesn't mean that he was the main subject of these articles, but it nevertheless highlights how Utah history is often framed through the lens of prominent Mormon religious and political figures. A further example of this is that Joseph Smith appears as the second most referenced historical figure despite having never stepped foot in Utah Territory.The list of historical figures also highlights an overwhelming gender disparity. To explore this at scale, we ran the list of historical figures through a “gender prediction” program that uses historical census data to predict a given individual's assigned gender at birth.13 While this method doesn't account for complex gender identities, it is still illustrative in highlighting the sharp disparity in representation between men and women. Several prominent women stand out in the top 100 list, including Juanita Brooks (94 references), Eliza R. Snow (89), Emmeline B. Wells (85), and Susa Young Gates (66). But overall, of this list of over 6,000 historical figures, only 15 percent were women (927). Measured another way, the 927 women figures were collectively referenced a total of 4,663 times, only around five hundred more times than references to just Brigham Young (4,110). This gender disparity has indeed fluctuated over time (see fig. 4). The year 2020 with its special issue on the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment represented a high point for female representation in the journal, with women comprising one-third of all referenced historical figures. But overall, there remains a gap when it comes to the representation of women in the quarterly.Women aren't the only group underrepresented in UHQ. Coverage of Utah's Indigenous and minority groups is another complicated issue. In a 2001 edited volume of previously published UHQ articles, titled Being Different: Stories of Utah's Minorities, former UHQ editor Stanford J. Layton argued that “Well before the New Social History became fashionable in academic circles, Utah Historical Quarterly had a deserved reputation for featuring immigrant peoples, making it a leading journal in the subject area.” In fact, by the 1970s there was not enough room in UHQ to print all of the articles that were being submitted on Utah's ethnic history. This led to the 1976 publication of The Peoples of Utah, a rich volume of stories edited by Helen Z. Papanikolas and published by the Utah State Historical Society.14 But what does representation look like over time?Our list of historical figures includes people from these different minority groups, but it is much more complicated to classify this list into different racial/ethnic groups at scale. Instead, we decided to use simple word counts as a crude way to get at the representation of minority groups in the quarterly. For example, if we want to understand at a broad and abstract level the appearance of Utah's indigenous groups, we can count how often words such as “Indigenous,” “Indian,” or “Native American” appear in the quarterly. Given that terms for different groups have changed over time (e.g. the term “Indigenous” didn't appear in UHQ until the 2000s), we created lists of keywords for each group. How we lump these keywords together largely depends on the level of abstraction at which we wish to study change over time. Moreover, determining who to include as a “marginalized” or minority group was also a subjective choice, one in which we drew inspiration from Papanikolas's The Peoples of Utah and Layton's Being Different. For our purposes here, we kept many of the groups quite large to explore broad and abstract trends (e.g. our Indigenous group includes Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Navajo, and Goshute). We settled on six groups with a set of corresponding keywords that are meant to be more suggestive than comprehensive, and certainly will not capture all references to any particular group. Some keywords are missing from the list below to avoid double-counting. For example, we don't include the term “American Indian” since counting the occurrences of “Indian” accounts for both “American Indian” and when “Indian” appears by itself. In other situations, we had to remove a word that is frequently used in contexts outside of a particular group, such as the word “Black,” which proved too difficult to distinguish at scale.Out of these six broad groups, the one that appears most frequently in the quarterly is the Indigenous group. This dates back to early issues of the journal. The first year of publication (1928), for example, included articles such as “Indian Names in Utah Geography,” “Some Useful Early Utah Indian References,” “Utah Indians Past and Present,” “Gunnison Massacre–1853–Millard County Utah–Indian Mareer's Version of the Tragedy–1894,” “Father Escalante and the Utah Indians,” and “Personal Recollections of the Wash-a-kie, Chief of the Shoshones.” Even since the 1950s, references to the Indigenous group have been two to four times as frequent as the other five groups combined.References to other minority groups have fluctuated significantly over time (see fig. 5). There was an overall spike in the 1970s that was in part related to a special issue on the Greek community by Helen Papanikolas. The 1980s to 2000s saw an increased interest in the Japanese and Chinese communities of Utah. This included a memoir by Yoshiko Uchida on her time in Topaz during WWII and a couple of histories of Keetley, Utah, with its Japanese American population.15 Publications in recent decades have included the stories of Chinese Utahns that move beyond their contributions to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. This includes the social history of local Chinese in such articles as “Utah's Chinatowns” (1996) and “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century Salt Lake City” (2004).16 Data for the 2020s only includes two years (2020 and 2021), but so far there has been a stronger representation of Black/African American histories than in previous decades. This includes articles such as “The Last State to Honor MLK” (2020), “Race, Latter-day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University” (2020), “Utah in the Green Book” (2020), along with even newer articles (not included in our dataset) such as “Not in My Neighborhood” (2022) and “BYU Slavery Project” (2022).17Of course, it should be noted that word counts do not get at how these groups are represented. It also does not mean that these histories are being written by members of the respective Indigenous or minority groups. These accounts are often filtered through the lenses of Mormon settlers, explorers, or non-Indigenous historians. Word counts also don't always show how these groups have been represented relative to other more dominant groups or historical figures. For example, the Indigenous group is consistently referenced more frequently than “Brigham Young.” But looking at the other five groups, in only two decades are one of the minority groups referenced more frequently. The first is in the 1990s with the East Asian group and the second is the 2020s where in two years of publication, the Black/African American group has so far been mentioned more often than Brigham Young (see fig. 5).The Utah State Historical Society has a lively tradition of publishing histories of Utah's diverse past, including articles in UHQ and Papanikolas's The Peoples of Utah. There is much to celebrate, but also room to grow. For example, we need more perspectives from groups that have been largely (and, at times, entirely) overlooked, such as the LGBTQ+ community. Looking forward, the Peoples of Utah Revisited is a promising initiative that should provide alternative perspectives in the telling of Utah's diverse past.Recent trends in the representation of Utah's women and other marginalized communities are promising but still mixed. To study this, we took a sample of a hundred research articles published between 2016 and 2021.18 Of these articles, two-thirds (66) have centered on the experiences of white men, whereas eighteen were about white women and only sixteen were about Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups. Moreover, recent his