A coffee table edition with more than 130 historic photographs and the stories behind them.

How well has the city adapted to these trends and various cultures, values, and competing interests? With great difficulty, reports John S. McCormick. Consider the Mormon-to-gentile transition in city government in 1890. The Mormon administration was constructing a combined city hall and county courthouse when they lost the election, and rather than complete the building near the Mormon temple, the new officials abandoned the site, designed their own edifice, and located it at the southernmost end of the non-Mormon business area. As McCormick explains: 

The LDS temple and the City and County Building were finished nearly simultaneously, the first in 1893 and the second a year later ... One is clearly a sacred structure, soaring and aspiring, the other a public one, solidly rooted in this world. One invites entrance, the other conveys a sealing off. The City and County Building's clock tower orients the building and its business in human time and the world of the everyday, while the temple's guardian angel Moroni orients it and its doings to God's time. The two buildings comprise an opposition, each sharply diverging from the other. Each is a temple, but one is a temple of the sacred, the other a temple of the secular. Each governs, but one governs within a theology, the other within a politics, and life in Salt Lake City at the turn of the century could not fail to take account of that dialectic, which spun out its logic continually.

				John S. McCormick, Ph.D., University of Iowa, is a professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is the author of The Historic Buildings of Downtown Salt Lake City; Past, Present, and Future: The History of Utah Power & Light Co.; The Utah Adventure; and The Westside of Salt Lake City. He is the co-author of Discovering Utah and Salaire, co-editor of A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History, and a contributor to Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History. He has published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Southwest Economy and Society, and Utah Historical Quarterly.
			Rod Decker is a Salt Lake City journalist, previously with the Deseret News and now a television news reporter for KUTV, channel 2. He is the author of An Environment for Murder, contributor to Leaving the Fold: Candid Conversations with Inactive Mormons, and is currently writing a political history of Utah.

From the dust jacket: Notions of homogeneity to the contrary, Salt Lake City has had a history of on-going religious, political, and ethnic conflict. When Mormon settlers arrived, they vied with indigenous people for economic, as well as cultural, hegemony. Over the ensuing years,through the Walker War, the Tintic War, the Blackhawk War, and other skirmishes, and through disease and disruption of the lifestyle and social fabric, Utah's native population declined from 20,000 in the late 1840s to a little over 2,000 at the turn of the century.

Mormons also wanted independence from the United States to which the latter responded by sending an army, in the face of which Mormons completely abandoned their capital city. They left it a ghost town until a negotiated peace allowed them to return. During the Civil War, federal troops again established a presence in Salt Lake City, this time in the foothills with cannons trained on the city below.

The status of black slaves was determined early on by an ordinance that required them to "labor faithfully all reasonable hours, and do such service with fidelity as may be required by his or her master or mistress." As elsewhere in the United States, blacks were an invisible part of the demographic landscape. Nor was the valley utopian for many of the foreign immigrants who crowded into several ethnic neighborhoods on the west side of town, who found work in the mines and railroad yards.

So, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the community that had once been a religious sanctuary and that had striven for communal enterprise became an example of good old-fashioned self-interest and frontier squabbling. People no longer even agreed on whether to fund municipal garbage collection or sewer installation. Labor unions mushroomed and radicals proliferated. Alongside respectable businesses, well-attended brothels appeared. During the Great Depression, marches, rallies, and demonstrations attracted thousands. In the 1960s a different brand of insurgence manifested itself in a vibrant counterculture. In the 1990s controversy over sexual orientation drew national attention. Over and over through this turbulence, the questions have been asked: Whose city is this? What voices should be heard? Whose opinion really counts? Such issues are what tend to preoccupy Professor McCormick's unique approach to history, utilizing historic photographs in order to punctuate his findings—the accumulated discoveries of years of research.