This year’s winner is Colleen McDannell for “Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization,” published in Spring 2023. In 1870s Utah, Latter-day Saint and Catholic leaders called on women to expand their traditional healing roles; and in Salt Lake City, two sets of women responded by founding Deseret Hospital and Holy Cross Hospital. Deseret Hospital closed just over a decade after its opening, while Holy Cross continued on for more than a century. In this carefully researched article, Colleen McDannell compares the two institutions and concludes that the hospitals’ outcomes came from how they dealt with a changing world. Both groups of women wanted to help the sick, but the Catholic women were better equipped to manage the transition to care based in hospitals rather than homes.

CHARLES REDD CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES AWARD | Awarded to the best general interest article appearing in the Utah Historical Quarterly.

This year’s winner is Kyler Wakefield for “Native Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression,” published in Spring 2023. In 1957 the Utah state legislature moved to grant universal suffrage to American Indians in the state. This overturned a Utah Supreme Court decision handed down in 1956 that denied the vote to people living on American Indian reservations. As Kyler Wakefield explains, the long wait for Native people in Utah to achieve full voting status has extended well beyond the events of the 1950s. Decades of federal Indian policy provide the context for understanding how sovereign tribal peoples struggled for so long to secure the vote. Guiding readers through this history, Wakefield powerfully details the struggle of American Indians in Utah to enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

NICK YENGICH MEMORIAL EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD | Awarded to the Utah Historical Quarterly article selected by the editors as their choice for the year.

This year’s winner is Jill Thorley Warnick for “Utah’s Women Homesteaders,” published in Spring 2023. In this fascinating article, Warnick mines land records and family histories to understand how Utah women used homestead laws to their benefit. She argues that many kinds of women—married, polygamous, separated, divorced, widowed, or single—jumped at the opportunity to own land. These women used homestead laws as part of a strategy to survive economically or even create intergenerational wealth. As Warnick asserts, these were adventures women chose for themselves.

LEROY S. AXLAND BEST UTAH HISTORY ARTICLE | Awarded to the best Utah history article not published in Utah Historical Quarterly.

This year’s winner is Lisa Olsen Tait for “Can Men Have Hearts?: Susa Young Gates’s Divorce, 1878,” published in the Journal of Mormon History, Spring 2023. In this article, Tait describes the painful divorce of Susa Young Gates, one of Brigham Young’s daughters and a prominent Latter-day Saint thinker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tait uses the heart-wrenching story to describe the gender norms of nineteenth-century Utah, where men dominated the legal system and women often faced blame for their husbands' abusive behavior.