What Amy Tanner Thiriot has accomplished is remarkable. This book is two things. The first hundred and fifty pages are a narrative survey of the history of Black people in Utah, and by extension, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It begins when members of the church settled in Utah in 1847 until 1862, when in the storm of the Civil War, Congress abolished slavery in Utah and the other territories of the United States. The second part is an exhaustive and painstaking accounting of everything Thiriot, an independent historian, genealogist, and researcher, could locate about Black people in Utah in those years, organized as a genealogical encyclopedia. Each entry explains what is known about the person and offers citations to the sources wherein they are documented. There are also a few addendums about enslavers and Black residents of Utah whose stories have been consistently misrepresented. This...

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