The Utah Historical Society has a long tradition of awarding special citations for scholarship and extraordinary contributions to Utah’s history or an allied field. Please see the individual award categories below and submit a nomination using the linked form.

Awarded to Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown for “Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath,” published by the Oxford University Press. In this book, Turley and Brown provide an unprecedented look at the consequences of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the related legal proceedings in the ensuing decades. They use previously unavailable sources to shed light on the atrocities, which have haunted the victims' families, Paiutes, and Latter-day Saints for more than a century and a half. Vengeance Is Mine is a sequel to the groundbreaking 2008 book Massacre at Mountain Meadows.

The Finalist for the Best Book in Utah History goes to Stephen C. Taysom for Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith, published by the University of Utah Press. In this book, Taysom provides a needed academic biography of an important figure in Latter-day Saint and Utah history. Joseph F. Smith witnessed, and played part in, many of the most important facets of Utah history in the second half of the nineteenth century, including colonizing the territory, antipolygamy legislation of the 1880s, the Hawaiian settlement of Iosepa, and statehood. Like a Fiery Meteor provides a balanced, scholarly approach to a complicated figure.

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.

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.

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.

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.