In This Issue

If there is one constant in history, it is change. But change is not necessarily always universal or consistent. Some beliefs and activities for human beings of the twenty-first century have changed little or not at all from those of our ancestors throughout past ages. It is a paradox of history that human experience changes and yet it does not. The articles in this issue for Spring 2008 deal with important changes in the attitudes, experiences, and sacred places of twentieth-century Utahns.

Our first article examines the prohibition of interracial marriage in Utah from the passage of legislation in 1888 banning miscegenation until its repeal by the Utah State Legislature seventy-five years later in 1963.While the anti-miscegenation law was on the books, African Americans and Asians were forbidden to marry whites. However, unlike other states, the Utah law said nothing about marriages between whites and Native Americans. Society has come to accept the inevitability and legality of interracial marriages. However, as the prohibition of interracial marriages has become history a new debate has arisen as to what relationships between individuals, in the eyes of the law, constitute marriage and family.

Lucien L. Nunn brought great change to Utah and its neighbors— Colorado and Idaho.Nunn was a pioneer in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century in the development of methods for generating electricity and distributing it to urban and rural residents, businesses ,and enterprises. It is hard to imagine a world without electricity. It is also difficult to grasp the impact that electricity has had on nearly every facet of our modern life. The production, distribution, and use of electricity have carried us out of the dark ages and expanded human activity in ways that our forefathers would have found simply miraculous. Nunn’s story, recounted in our second article, illustrates the challenges that he faced in providing cheap and dependable electricity throughout the Intermountain West.

ABOVE: These photographs taken from the same vantage point show Memory Grove in 1998 before the August 11, 1999 ,tornado devastated the park as depicted in second photo taken one week after the tornado struck.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WILLIAM S. LOVE.

One of the constants in the human experience is remembering and honoring the sacrifices and accomplishments of others. Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove established in 1924 in City Creek Canyon just east of the Utah State Capitol is a place for remembering and honoring. The 665 Utah servicemen who lost their lives in World War I and the 3,660 who died during World War II are remembered, as are those heroes of subsequent conflicts, in this sacred place where the steep slopes of the canyon seem to offer peace, serenity, and security. The text and illustrations for our third article show that change also affects a sacred place established as “a lasting memorial to the hero dead of Utah.”

Eliud “Pete” Suazo was a man who both demonstrated change and sought change. As Utah’s first Hispanic state senator, he represented a significant though politically marginalized portion of the state’s population. Tragically, his life ended at the age of fifty while he was serving in the Utah state senate at a time when his long-time efforts to secure passage of hate-crime legislation offered the hope of success. Our final article recounts his youth growing up on Salt Lake City’s Westside, his emergence as a political leader, and his efforts in behalf of the state’s poor, youth, disadvantaged, and minorities.