In This Issue

From time to time, the UHQ publishes pieces of such contemporary resonance that we are certain they can to contribute to public dialogue and inform modern challenges in more than superficial ways. It occurs to us that the essays in this issue—all about topics have some contemporary corollary—have the potential to do that.

Few subjects are as much of a hot-button as race and sports in America. The debate, now spanning many years, over the name of the Washington Redskins NFL team, for instance, reveals the intransigence and intractability that accompany issues of this sort. Our lead article brings this question to Utah and one of the state’s revered institutions. The University of Utah took up the Ute name and imagery in the early twentieth century, just when other professional and collegiate teams did so, and since then its representation has run the gamut from the offensive to the more benign. The university’s continued embrace of the Ute name in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, despite some previous calls for abandonment, signals its renewed commitment not just to a tradition but to a Native tribe to whom that name belongs.

At this writing, the Bill Cosby rape case remains very much in the news, as do incidents of rape and harassment on campus. Sexual violence is, of course, not a new problem. Our second article broaches this topic by examining the legal and cultural context surrounding rape in the 1930s and 1940s. Puzzling out the exact number of rapes that occurred during those years is an impossible task. Then—as now—many instances of sexual violence went unreported. Further, the legal definition of rape, hinging on the elements of force and resistance, has changed since the mid-twentieth century, and the successful prosecution of rape was difficult. Yet even with these qualifiers, the article argues, it is possible to discern an environment in wartime Utah where rape increased and “the courts favored male suspects over female victims.”

Our third essay, a history of the creation of Cedar Breaks National Monument, illustrates contending ideas of public lands management and use in Progressive Era–Utah. The author triangulates among local interests in Cedar City and Parowan, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service to demonstrate differences between federal agencies over state conservation and also between federal-local interests over proper management and protection of valuable resources. These lands had a deep history of local use, and, as this essay demonstrates, locals in Iron County disagreed over their value as the stage for tourist travel or as traditional forest uses. The story is familiar in Utah; and yet, in this piece we see a sharp focus on the peculiarities of a people and place.

Boosterism, or the full-throated promotion of a place, played a conspicuous role in the settlement of the American West. Today, the same kind of activity is associated with chambers of commerce and local economic development. The final article in this summer issue of UHQ takes us on the road to look at the history of boosting U.S. Highway 89, as well as the towns and attractions it transects. Necessarily, the promotion of Highway 89—which stretches throughout the mountain West from the Mexican to the Canadian border—involved business and government figures from many places in an attempt, among other things, to attract increasing numbers of tourists to the area. Because they used modern marketing techniques and championed the development of the highway itself, their efforts eventually bore fruit.