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This chapter follows Massasoit through eighty years of unveilings and dedication ceremonies across diverse locations to interrogate how the national narrative originally imagined by the Improved Order of Red Men was staged and how audiences received it in Plymouth and locations far away from New England. The interplay between the intended narrative of national belonging and regional/local ramifications of the statue's installation is noted, and indigenous perspectives are included. Even after the unveiling ceremonies in each locale and era (Plymouth in 1921, Salt Lake City in 1922 and 1959, and Evergreen Park, Kansas City, Spokane, and Provo in late 1970s), the statue continued to accumulate meaning for viewers. This chapter argues that Massasoit served as a stage (or staging ground) for public discussions over cultural appropriation and the place of Native people in national and local historical consciousness.

Jane and Isaac James divorced in 1870. Their reasons for doing so are unknown, but may have been related to Jane’s devotion to the LDS Church and Isaac’s inability to live up to LDS standards of masculinity. Jane reported that Isaac left her for a white fortune teller. After the divorce, Jane moved closer to the center of Salt Lake City; Isaac left Utah. Jane James lost several children and grandchildren to death. The Relief Society, the LDS women’s organization, supported Jane financially and spiritually in this difficult time. She got remarried to Frank Perkins, a black Mormon widower. In 1875, along with several other black Mormons, Jane and Frank Perkins went to the Endowment House—a temporary ritual space used until the LDS temple was completed—to perform baptisms for the dead. The Perkins’s marriage dissolved within two years.

This chapter examines Bautista’s U.S. residency (1910 to 1922) and its influence on his spiritual trajectory. It argues that during his first twelve years in the United States, Bautista experienced a decade of unprecedented personal growth and opportunity, which probably led him to expect a lifetime of increasing responsibility as a Mexican member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bautista crossed the border a month before the Mexican Revolution began. He settled first in Mesa, Arizona, but moved to Utah in 1913 where he helped found the first Spanish-speaking branch of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. Though initially a gardener on Temple Square, Bautista became president of his congregation and the Lamanite Genealogical Society, mastered temple rituals and Mormon doctrine, published an article, and spoke to audiences about his experiences as a Mexican Mormon.

In the 1960s, Salt Lake City’s Temple Square became a First Amendment battleground in which various groups contested the meaning of free expression, religious freedom, and civic equality. In that decade, the NAACP and other civil rights groups used protests and threatened protests at Temple Square to prod the LDS Church to publicly support civil rights. The church did so, but it also used the language of American freedom to defend its internal policies that restricted African American Latter-day Saints to second-tier status within the church. The role of Temple Square as a magnet for intra-Mormon and external protests continued in the twenty-first century during conflicts over the ordination of women to the priesthood and the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

This chapter discusses the activities of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of its conductor, Evan Stephens. In 1890 Mormons outgrew two fads, one doctrinal, the other musical. First was the idea that the world would end between December 1890 and December 1891. This commonplace belief, which helped nurture Mormon ferocity in the face of anti-polygamy legislation, derived from a statement Joseph Smith had made in 1835. In musical terms, entering the mainstream meant full commitment to standard musical notation and a letting-go of the musical fad of the Tonic sol-fa method. In 1891, William D. Davies, Welsh cultural ambassador from the New York newspaper Y Drych, toured Utah, heard Stephens's Choir and pronounced it the best choir in the world. This chapter considers the controversies faced by the Choir during Stephens's term as well as its concerts, domestic tours, and the competitions it joined. It also examines how the Choir continued its mission of public visibility without even leaving Salt Lake City.

This chapter brings personal experience with history into focus by recounting interviews with passersby as they talk about Massasoit and what the statue means to them, and juxtaposing these accounts with the living history museum Plimoth Plantation and the Public Broadcasting Station "experiential history" series Colonial House. This chapter seeks to understand three related phenomenon: how people experience historical distance between the past and present; how people endeavour to close the distance through consuming history as experience; and the ways in which Native peoples force a reckoning with Indigenous perspectives in Plymouth-centered narratives. Massasoit statues outside of Plymouth offer the greatest cognitive and geographic distance, and therefore a "safe" way to wrestle with the discomfort involved in coming to terms with colonialism. But the place of Plymouth and presence of Native educators makes a difference for closing the distance. Since the first 1970 United American Indians of New England protests, viewers of Massasoit must engage more fully in the nation's history. Plimoth Plantation and Colonial House likewise work to close the distance between the past and present through personal experience. This chapter argues that Native educators and activists play a crucial role for closing the distance and pushing a reckoning with history.

This chapter begins with a range of actions cities can pursue to deprioritize cars while making room on their streets for transit, cyclists, and walkers. It then describes how these strategies work in greenovating cities. The chapter presents the case of Oslo, which is moving toward a car-free downtown. It then looks at three American cases that illuminate the technical, political, and cultural barriers to deprioritizing cars. Efforts in Seattle illustrate that even in a liberal city committed to climate action, deprioritizing cars is painful and politically charged. Nashville’s two failed ballot initiatives to fund transit infrastructure reveal the challenges many cities will face in trying to introduce public transit. Finally, Salt Lake City has been successful in implementing transit. With broad public support and constraints caused by mountains and lakes, Salt Lake City has been able to forge new transit links to reduce congestion.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new journalist communities at the Olympic Games, which articulate how its media community has grown. It argues that the expansion of the Olympic “fringe” journalist community results from the exclusive arrangements that surround sports reporting, but also the growing expansion of mega-events to become more like cultural festivals, which attract the interests of non-sports reporters. In so doing, the chapter charts the rise of the non-accredited media center and its strategic role for Olympic hosts, made possible by the extended means of reporting via digital technologies. While the chapter urges caution in claiming that this expansion reveals a trajectory toward greater media freedom at the Games, it does identify how media expansion is changing the way that traditional media organizations operate, provoking a democratization of media expertise and the re-professionalization of journalism.

This chapter presents the civic capacity's role in innovative efforts to manage urban growth in Mumbai in India and Salt Lake City in the United States, exemplars of the distinct problems of uneven urban growth being faced by both developed and developing countries. Both of these cases, which highlight the problems of unsustainable, inefficient, and inequitable urbanization, also exemplify the challenges of civic action in rich and poor democracies. Experts are of the opinion that new civic approaches have been adopted and utilized by both cities in solving problems of urbanization through collective civic action. The chapter also describes a model that can be followed by other cities facing similar problems.

This chapter introduces three of the main figures of the book, Joseph Smith Jr., Jane Manning James, and Wakara. It also introduces how these different Mormons conceptualized their relationship with God, and their relationship with other members of the Mormon people, especially members of different races. The founder of Mormonism, Smith believed that he was divinely mandated to create a religious movement that would end all divisions within the human family, including racial divisions. The Ute chief, Wakara, and his brother Arapeen believed that they were divinely called to share the lands of Utah with white settlers, but also called to fight against Mormon efforts to destroy the Ute way of life. An early black Mormon pioneer, James believed that she was divinely called to prove her Mormonness, which would help her shed her supposed black accursedness.

The three of us, teachers from the early years of the OC, have yet to find professional situations where both the challenges and the support are as strong as in the OC. (Marcy went on to start her own business boarding and training horses; Theresa is now principal of a private school; Marilyn became a university professor.) Perhaps the combination of challenges and support was the key to why this was such a powerful context for our growth and development—and for the development of this learning community. We trace a significant strand of our intellectual growth and development to our participation in the early years of the OC (and, before it, the Thoreau School). Its influence has followed us into our subsequent personal and professional lives, permeating the crevices of our minds and feelings in ways that we have only recently come to appreciate. Our recollections of being teachers in the OC are filled with sharp images and memorable experiences; it was a time of challenge, exhilaration, and exhaustion. We have likely romanticized some of these memories, yet the pains are also vivid. What is most evident is that it was a time of immeasurable learning, for us as individuals as well as for the development of the program as a whole. Many aspects of our participation in the OC prompted this learning. The inherent ambiguity of our loosely defined roles and the changing nature of the program created a challenging environment for us as teachers. Our roles and responsibilities as teachers were ill-defined, collaborative decision making was an unfamiliar way to make educational decisions, and the curriculum was open-ended and required the integration of student and parent interests. As a consequence, we developed a strong, mutual support system, which in turn encouraged the risk taking that nurtured our further development as teachers. The intense support and challenges are the basis of the initial and continuing development of the curriculum and philosophical principles of this community.