From The Making of a State: A School History of Utah, published in 1908, to Utah Our Home, published in 2011, schoolchildren have learned Utah history from fourteen textbooks. This article reviews those books, sketches their legal and institutional context, recounts public arguments about them, and notes how their accounts of Utah history have changed. In their views and outlook, Utah history texts have followed United States history texts and Utah historical writing. Over the century and more they have been written, Utah texts have become broader in focus and more inclusive in coverage. Texts published in the past fifty years show Native Americans more respect and non-Mormons more attention than earlier texts did. School history texts have become more critical of Latter-day Saints and pay less attention to them. In fact, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is barely mentioned in recent textbook accounts of Utah history after statehood. I argue that this reduced attention to Latter-day Saints has led authors to overlook important developments in Utah politics and misrepresent contemporary Utah.Every school textbook is marked with an imprimatur. Each book was submitted to the State Instructional Materials Commission (as it is now called) and received official approval for use in classrooms. Only fourteen books have been approved. They constitute an officially defined sample of Utah historical writing. That sample does not accurately represent the whole of written Utah history. But authors study Utah history and try to select the best information for students, so texts do offer an imperfect-but-still-useful summary of historical understanding at the time they were written. Every text was written specifically to be used in schools. They were written simply so the fourth and seventh graders in Utah history classes could understand them; they neither footnote sources nor include a bibliography. School texts are published by businesses to make money. Because publishers and authors know their book will need approval from a state committee and will be read by children, they try to avoid controversy. They try not to offend any vocal group whose protests might prevent state approval or persuade schools not to buy the book. “You can't criticize anyone,” says author Richard Holzapfel about writing texts.1 School texts aspire to comprehensiveness. Their authors select a beginning of Utah history and then carry the narrative as close to the present as practicable. Thus, every text presents a view of the whole of Utah history up to the time it was written. Texts may be the most widely read Utah history books. The author John McCormick says his text Discovering Utah sold 16,000 copies; his second text, The Utah Adventure, sold 20,000, while his co-authored A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary sold only 400 copies.2State law requires public schools to teach Utah history, a mandate the legislature did not enact until 1996, after most schools had been teaching state history in fourth and seventh grades for decades.3 In the early 1990s, the State Board of Education convened a committee to study the state history program. The committee recommended that the course should be divided: Utah history before statehood should be taught in fourth grade, and Utah history after statehood should be taught in seventh, instead of teaching all of state history in both grades. The division would reduce duplication and allow for teaching more geography, economics, and civics in seventh grade, thus making that course “more relevant,” according to Nancy Mathews, the state history curriculum specialist.4 But some Utah conservatives opposed the plan, saying it “would wipe Mormons out of Utah's history.”5 (They feared Latter-day Saints would receive less attention in the seventh-grade course.) State senator Charles Stewart, a Republican from Provo, successfully sponsored a new law that required schools to teach the whole of Utah history, including “territorial and preterritorial developments,” thus barring the proposed change. The new law was placed in the “civic and character education” section of the state code, next to the mandate to teach “honesty, integrity, morality,” “respect for parents and families,” and “the benefits of the free enterprise system.” The stated goal was “to promote an upright and desirable citizenry.”6 Most schools continue to teach state history in the fourth grade and then again in the seventh grade with the legally prescribed aim of improving citizenship.Long before they required schools to teach history, legislators provided for regulation of textbooks. Lawmakers created the State Textbook Commission in 1909, and the commission still meets, although its name has been changed to the State Instructional Materials Commission.For decades, school districts were required to purchase only texts approved by the commission. Then, in 2014, the State Board of Education resolved that local school districts were free to buy texts they chose, and state approval became advisory. In 2019, state law said each school could choose its own texts.7 Though a few schools have used books that were not recommended by the Instructional Materials Commission, authors and publishers still believe they need state approval to persuade most schools to buy their book and make it profitable.8Changes in Utah history texts followed changes in United States history texts. Since the 1960s, United States history texts revised the old school history of successful nation-building led by white men by giving more space and respect to women, people of color, and later-arriving ethnic groups. National texts also became more critical of the white men who had been the heroes of earlier accounts.9 Beginning about ten years later, Utah history texts changed in similar ways, with recent immigrants, women, and people of color receiving more attention and white men and Latter-day Saints receiving less attention and more criticism. There were differences in the way changes came. Rewriting United States history roused public conflict, even “history wars” over how the nation's past should be retold.10 Some states have also had lawsuits and legislative debates over state history texts.11 School history in Utah changed in comparative peace, though this article tells of a few disagreements. Another difference is that beginning in the mid-1970s, books and articles recounted the arguments over teaching American history in schools.12 In contrast, other than accounts of particular controversies, there is little such literature for the teaching of state history.13 I believe this article is the first attempt to show how any state's history has been taught and how that teaching has changed.Besides following national texts, Utah textbooks followed a change in the views of Utah historians, especially with respect to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “In the 1940s, the fields of Utah and Mormon history were inextricably intertwined,” Richard L. Saunders wrote in 2019.14 Early textbook authors saw Utah history as the story of the Latter-day Saint pioneers, the society they founded, and the fortunes of their successors. Levi Edgar Young said he wrote his 1923 school text to “stimulate a love for the pioneers.”15 Apparent in each of the early texts is the desire to tell the story of pioneer forebears and to preserve that story for Utah children. These authors revered the pioneers. “No mountain was too high, or canyon too winding or difficult, or desert too parched, or narrows too impassable for those strong men and courageous women to attempt,” wrote John Henry Evans in his school text.16 The story told in early texts is how pioneers overcame hardship and prejudice to make the desert blossom and to win statehood and acceptance as Americans. In his essay, Saunders noted how beginning in the 1940s Juanita Brooks and other historians wrote more critically of Latter-day Saints. Gary Topping, in Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History, placed Brooks as part of a turning point in Utah historical writing in midcentury, which also included the work of Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Before the turning point, Topping wrote, most of Utah history was “a Mormon triumphalism that glorified the Mormon pioneer experience while turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and either denigrating or ignoring the contributions of other groups.”17 Among other examples of the old kind of writing, he cited two school textbooks, Levi Edgar Young's The Founding of Utah and Milton R. Hunter's Utah in Her Western Setting. (He also criticized Whitney's “pro-Mormon” bias, though he referred to Whitney's general histories rather than his school text.) Topping said the midcentury reconstruction of Utah history broke the grip of “a church-sponsored orthodoxy grounded in a selective body of facts,” and led historians to a more critical stance toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to a broader inclusion of different peoples and their viewpoints.18 That change affected subsequent Utah historical writing, including school texts.As historians came to question the old place of Latter-day Saints in school history, so did teachers and, occasionally, the public. Both Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons worried school history might be biased, but they each feared bias against their side. John McCormick taught seminars in Utah history for schoolteachers. He reports that Latter-day Saint teachers feared their church would be treated unfairly, while non-Mormon teachers worried texts would show bias in favor of Latter-day Saints. The first public debate on texts I found were letters to the editor denouncing Milton R. Hunter's texts as pro-Mormon “propaganda.”19 Almost thirty years later, President Dallin Oaks, now of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, argued on the other side. He cited studies and complained that American History texts “have avoided reference to God or to religion.”20 Michelle Parish-Pixler of the Utah Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union replied in 1990 that Utah schools are controlled by Latter-day Saints and teach “academically discredited versions of LDS history.”21 More people worried over bias in schools and the teaching of Utah history than spoke publicly about them. A public opinion poll on “Mormon control of Utah public schools” was conducted in 1974. Sixty percent of all respondents said Mormons exercised at least some control of public schools. But Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons saw control differently. Forty-five percent of non-Mormons believed Mormons were “very much” in control of public schools, while only 12 percent of Latter-day Saints believed control was that strong. Respondents believed history courses were “the most common source of reference to Mormons or Mormon ideas” in public schools.22Authors of early texts included Latter-day Saint leaders. Whitney wrote his text while serving as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles.23 Young and Hunter both sat in the Quorum of Seventies, the next highest church governing body.24 Some authors were trained historians. Hunter, Ellsworth, McCormick, and Holzapfel earned doctorates in history from out-of-state universities. Young taught at the University of Utah, Ellsworth at Utah State University, McCormick at Salt Lake Community College, and Holzapfel at Brigham Young University.25 Evans, who wrote Joseph Smith: An American Prophet among other books on Latter-day Saint religion, taught at the LDS Business College.26 Buttle received degrees from Brigham Young University and taught in Utah high schools and junior highs.27 The three McCormick books were written for fourth-grade students; all the others were written for seventh graders. Ellsworth's Utah's Heritage won the Mormon History Association's best book award in 1973, and later authors said they used that book as a model for their own.28Publishing school texts has become a specialty, and publishers wield increasing influence. Gibbs Smith Publishing in Layton, Utah, brought out the last seven Utah history texts. (Peregrine Smith is an earlier name of that company.) Jared Taylor, head of the education division of Gibbs Smith, says that company publishes more state history texts for schools than anyone else.29 Besides The Utah Journey, Gibbs Smith published The Kansas Journey, The New Mexico Journey, and The Washington Journey, among others. Earlier school-text publishing was more diverse, and included self-publishing, academic, and commercial presses. Deseret News Press published Whitney's text and Hunter's first book. Hunter published his second text himself. New York publishers Charles Scribner and Macmillan published Young and Evans, respectively. Brigham Young University Press published both of Buttle's books. Publishers have become more active in writing texts. For The Utah Journey, published in 2009, Gibbs Smith assembled a twelve-person team of historians, educators, and an editor. Richard Holzapfel, author of Utah: A Journey of Discovery, was most prominently mentioned in the team, but he didn't have final say over the product. The team, which I call “the Committee,” used material from Holzapfel's book and from Utah's Heritage to “develop” a new text.Education officials have also asserted more control over the production of texts. In 1984, the Utah Board of Education formed a committee to develop “core standards” for most subjects, including state history.30 Most states have adopted such standards. In its introduction to the Utah standards, the board said, “the standards outline essential knowledge, content, and skills to be mastered.” The standards committee changed the name of the history course to “Utah Studies,” and adopted standards that include “economics, geology, geography, history, and political science/civics.”31 For example, standard 2.1 says: “Students will explain the causes and lasting effects of the Mormon migration to Utah.”32 Standard 5.3 says, “Students will use data regarding the key components of Utah's economy to make recommendations for sustainable development.”33 Each of the twenty-eight standards for Utah Studies defines a learning requirement. The standards are periodically updated, the last time in 2016. They form a blueprint for writing any new text. “The first thing we do is write to standards,” said Jared Taylor. “It's the bible, the North Star; it's what we do.”34Even before state standards, authors, beginning with Hunter, had enlarged the scope of state history texts. The first four texts, including Hunter's first one published in 1946, taught mostly history. But in his second book, Hunter condensed the history from his first and made room for a chapter of archaeology on Native Americans and a chapter on civics and state government. The biggest addition, however, was more than twenty chapters on contemporary Utah, especially the economy: “The Story of Uranium in Utah,” “The Story of Defense in Utah,” and “The Story of Utah's Farms and Farm Marketing” were some of his chapter titles. Subsequent texts followed Hunter's lead and included more academic disciplines in Utah history texts.After midcentury, texts also became larger and more colorful. Whitney, Young, and Evans, the first three authors, wrote handbook-sized texts, about five-by-seven inches in plain, hard-backed covers. They had fifty to one hundred black-and-white photographs or maps scattered through 320 to 445 pages of text. Later texts are larger, up to 9¾ by 10¾ inches, with 220 to 510 pages. They have shiny, colorful covers featuring pictures of Native American art or Utah scenery. Almost every page in the latest texts has pictures or drawings. Some pages have four or five pictures, many in color. The text may be divided into two columns on each page, with small blocks of type set off by headings and many sidebars, presenting many short sections adapted to students’ attention. Besides leading change in textbook scope, Milton R. Hunter also led change in format and appearance. His first book was an old-style text, but his second began the trend toward bigger books, many pictures, and color.Utah texts also changed the content of the history they teach, giving more attention to groups besides the Latter-day Saints. Buttle and Ellsworth were the first authors to say they would broaden their coverage in Utah history texts and include more information about other Utahns. Buttle said she wrote partly on “a crusade” to include non-Mormons in Utah history, and Ellsworth promised his book would go beyond, “the usual political, ecclesiastical and settlement history.”35 Both also said the texts in schools at the time were “biased.” Ellsworth added that the current text was “incomplete in its coverage [and] disproportionate in its treatment.” (Both authors referred to Hunter's texts, although neither named him.) Because Buttle and Ellsworth were the first Utah textbook authors to explicitly raise the issues of inclusion and bias, I call the nine texts that began with them “new” or “modern,” and the five texts before them the “old” or “early” texts. This change in Utah history textbooks came about ten years after the change in Utah historical writing referred to by Saunders and Topping. The procedure for this article was to read or skim the texts and to select topics for comparison. All the books were at hand during the writing except those written by Buttle, which were only available in a special collections’ library and had to be read on site. Indexes were used to find quotes and anecdotes that best illustrated how history changed from the early to the modern texts. This article will discuss differences in what textbooks said about Latter-day Saints, Native Americans, women, the environment, territorial religious politics, and later-arriving immigrant groups.Modern authors revised some Latter-day Saint stories. All the texts, for example, tell of swarms of crickets that ate settlers’ crops in 1848, and of seagulls that ate the crickets and saved pioneers from starvation. The first three texts emphasize, without endorsing the belief, that the pioneers prayed for help and saw the gulls as a miracle.36 Hunter went further: “Then the miracle happened,” he wrote, implying the miracle was a fact.37 By contrast, Buttle and Ellsworth tell of crickets and gulls but say nothing of prayer or miracles. The Utah Journey, the latest seventh-grade text, says of seagulls and crickets that “the story falls more within the realm of legend than historical accuracy.” The older texts recounted the religious explanation of the incident in full and left open the possibility that it might be true. The new texts either leave out possible religious explanation or imply politely that it isn't true.38While texts became skeptical of divine action in the cricket story, they shifted blame on the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. At Mountain Meadows, Mormon settlers from communities in and around Cedar City, perhaps aided by Paiutes, killed about 120 men, women, and children traveling through Utah.39 Although several books have been written about the massacre, beginning with Juanita Brooks's The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950, the textbook accounts are brief, none longer than two pages. Whitney and Young, the earliest texts, acknowledged whites were among the murderers but blamed Native Americans. “The Indians often perpetrated deeds which were terrible and which we wish had never happened,” Young summed up.40 Evans blamed John D. Lee, a Latter-day Saint leader in charge of a church project to help Indians learn to farm. He correctly noted Lee alone was later tried and executed for the crime.41In his 1946 text, Hunter mentions the massacre in one sentence: “Some white men assisted the Indians in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took place in the fall of 1857.”42 His second book made no mention of Mountain Meadows. The McCormicks also left it out of their first text, deeming the tale too bloody for their fourth-grade readers. Later, John McCormick regretted that decision and included Mountain Meadows in his second and third texts.43 Ellsworth's anguish at the horror of the deed seeps through his account. He suggests Latter-day Saints joined the massacre to keep good relations with the Paiutes.44 Holzapfel, writing in the 1990s, changed the story, placing more blame on Latter-day Saints.45 In The Utah Journey, the Committee adopted Holzapfel's account, partly copying his words. That text says, “John D. Lee, and other members of the militia convinced the generally peaceful Paiutes to join them at Mountain Meadows.”46 Over one hundred years of school history, then, blame for the Mountain Meadows massacre moved from Native Americans to Latter-day Saints.47Shifting Mountain Meadows blame from Paiutes to pioneers is part of larger changes in what texts say about Native Americans. Among the first four texts, only Young writes of Native American prehistory.48 Other early texts introduced Native Americans mostly when Europeans met them. In those accounts, missionaries, traders, and pioneers occupy the center of the story. Then, beginning with Hunter's second book, texts began including a chapter on prehistoric tribes and the archaeological record dating back thousands of years. In this way, Europeans become part of a much longer history rather than the beginning of the story. The texts also differ in how they treat Native Americans after Utah statehood. The first four texts scarcely mention Native peoples in the twentieth century. Then Hunter, in The Utah Story (1960), included a chapter on contemporary Native peoples, focusing on how some tribal members had adopted white ways while others had not.49 Following Hunter, authors told of Native Americans after Utah statehood, but instead of writing a separate chapter, as Hunter did, they scattered information throughout their books. As examples, Ellsworth gave the fullest account of changing federal Indian policy and its effects on Utah tribes, while McCormick and Holzapfel included short portraits of contemporary Native American activists and artists.50There were other differences. The pioneers looked down on Indigenous peoples, and the authors of the old texts did too. “The Utes were a degraded people who lived in huts and wigwams and lived mainly by hunting and fishing,” wrote Whitney.51 Modern texts are more respectful in language and attitude. Early texts celebrated the derring-do of trappers and mountain men when they faced Native Americans and told stories like those in cowboy-and-Indian movies, popular when those texts were written.52 Later texts do not tell tales of boldness and bravado against Indigenous people. Holzapfel and McCormick explain that mountain men were racist and exploitive, and the judgment of history has turned against them.53 Texts cited Brigham Young's oft-quoted saying that “It is cheaper to feed the Indians than to fight them.”54 Early texts pointed to Young's peaceful Indian policy and to Latter-day Saint farms and missions for Native Americans as evidence that Latter-day Saints were kinder to Native Americans than settlers were elsewhere.55 “At all times were the Indians approached with the highest Christian Charity,” wrote Levi Edgar Young.56 In contrast, new texts looked at outcomes: McCormick notes, and the Committee quotes him, that “In 1846, before the pioneers came, there were about 20,000 Indians, and almost no whites. By 1900, there were only 2,500 Indians and 300,000 whites.”57 Unlike the old texts, recent authors see white conquest as a calamity for Native peoples.The texts also diverge over resistance and violence. Early texts depict Native Americans who wanted peace as good and those for war as bad. For example, both Whitney and Young tell of an argument between chiefs Sowiette, who was for peace, and Wakara, who favored war. Sowiette whips Wakara, who is depicted as weak, even cowardly.58 Wakara later led the Walker War against the pioneers. The old historians believed Native American violent resistance was wrong. In contrast, Holzapfel, the Committee, and McCormick seem to see some justification for resistance. All of them, for example, tell how Chief Blackhawk, Utah's most successful Native American fighting leader, was reburied by his people with honor.59The Bear River battle and massacre of 1863 shows the largest revision in judgment on warfare. Whitney begins his account of the “battle” of Bear River by noting that a band of Shoshones killed some miners passing through Cache Valley. A survivor went to a federal judge who issued a warrant for the arrest of three chiefs of the band. With the warrant, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led 275 soldiers north from Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City to fight about an equal number of Shoshone men.60 The latest seventh-grade text, written by the Committee, does not mention dead miners or courts, but says, “many times ruthless or frightened travelers shot friendly Shoshones,” thus making the background to the tragedy killings by whites rather than by Shoshone. Colonel Connor, the same text reads, “intended to kill all the Indian people at the camp whether or not they were guilty of a crime.”61 Both Ellsworth and Whitney tell of hours of fierce and deadly fighting before the soldiers defeated the Shoshone.62 The Committee's text, by contrast, tells nothing of battle: “The soldiers massacred about 300 men, women and children before burning the tepees and riding away.”63 No school account tells how soldiers killed wounded warriors and raped women after the battle, nor does any mention the 120 women and children survivors helped by local Latter-day Saints.64 Over 108 years of Utah textbooks, Bear River turned from a victorious “battle” by federal troops into a “massacre” and a white atrocity.Like Native Americans, women also become more prominent in the new histories. Whitney, the first author, put seventy-one pictures of prominent people in his text; seventy of them were men (sixty-seven white men and three Native American chiefs). He included one woman, Julia Dean Hayne, a touring actress who played the old Salt Lake Theater. In comparison, the latest seventh-grade text, developed by the Committee, has twenty-six “Utah portraits”—pictures and accompanying biographical text of historical Utah people. Eighteen of them are men (including four Native Americans and one African American), and eight are women. In the older texts, women are almost absent from the main narratives. But in The Utah Journey, polygamy, for example, is explained mostly from women's viewpoint. The pages on education feature women, and women are often quoted in discussions of ethnic groups or when the text recounts experiences of ordinary people. Even so, most of the main narrative is about men, and the textbook changes with respect to women are less marked than those concerning Native peoples or ethnic groups.Authors of the older texts took pride in Utah's national parks and monuments and employed their most poetic phrases in praise of Utah scenery. “Nature has chiseled out a veritable temple of beauty,” said Young of Zion Canyon.65 Whitney alone wrote before Utah had parks or monuments, and he had little praise for scenery. He said Utah was “the great American desert,” a name that emphasized the pioneer achievement in making it blossom.66 Whitney is the only author who mentions the Salt Lake County smelters that around the turn of the twentieth century emitted sulfurous smoke damaging crops on nearby farms. Court cases forced some of them to close.67 With those exceptions, the older texts don't discuss measures to protect the environment.Environmental issues in John McCormick's The Utah Adventure provoked Utah's most publicized textbook argument. When the textbook commission received the fourth-grade text in 1997, it appointed reviewers and suggested teachers might use the book in classes on a trial basis. Bonnie Morgan, the state director of curriculum, praised the “well-written content, maps, and colorful illustrations.” But then San Juan County Commissioner Ty Lewis complained the book was “a blatant attempt by the federal government and environmentalists to try to brainwash our young students into believing their ancestors were petty opportunists having no conscience about the lands for which they had stewardship.”68 The Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank, and a few individuals joined in the complaint. Among other things, they pointed to questions designed to spark class discussion. “What if,” the book asked, “we cut down all the forests for buildings?” What if “companies only cared about making money and did not care about our land, water, and air?”69 Although opponents of the text were not numerous, they were vocal and effective. Textbook commissioners asked for changes before they would approve the book. They were late: ten thousand books had already been purchased and were in student hands.The editor Susan Meyers, who spoke for the publisher, however, quickly agreed to make changes. Publisher and author cut out the questions that offended the protestors. They also eliminated a quote by the American nature writer Barry Lopez—“To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece.” They cut a section heading, “The Earth is Our Mother.”70 In all they changed twenty-three pages of the text and sent the new pages to schools that had already bought the book, so they could be substituted for the old offending pages. Commissioners then approved the text. Both the complainants and the publishers said they were happy with the outcome.71 “I was happy enough,” McCormick said later, meaning he would rather have made the changes than have lost approval for the book.72 Even after the changes, McCormick's text still praised environment