Utah Westerners

March Announcement for the Utah Westerners

March 7, 2016 at 10:03 am kenttschanz Leave a comment

“City in the World: Reinventing Zion

in Nineteenth Century Utah”

Thomas Carter

Thomas Carter is a University of Utah professor emeritus and author of the recently published book, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement (University of Minnesota Press 2015). Dr. Carter will talk about the book, how it came into being, and why we should all read it. Many of you may know Tom. He worked in the early 1980s as an architectural historian for the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, and then moved to the U’s School of Architecture, where he taught architectural history and preservation until his retirement several years ago.

Tom is probably best known for his work with the vernacular/regional building traditions of Utah and other western states, and for the way he uses the built environment as a tool for doing history. For him, buildings are documents that can be read for meaning—that is, what people choose to build becomes an important sign of the kind of world in which they want to live. The process is archaeological in that it involves moving from artifacts back to the ideas that produced them, and historical in its reliance on written records to provide a contextual framework for interpretation. produced them, and historical in its reliance on written records to provide a contextual framework for interpretation.

In Building Zion, Carter argues that by looking at the physical Zion—the Zion that actually got built rather than the one people talked about building—we can learn a great deal about early Mormon cultural history. The lesson in the human landscape, he suggests, is rooted in a fundamental struggle between Zion as the “City on the Hill,” a perfected religious utopia, and a “City in the World,” a not-so-perfect place where the Saints could maintain their religion but also co-exist with their American neighbors. In the end, the latter course was chosen and in his book and in his illustrated talk to us, Tom will explain how this transformation occurred, and how it shaped the Utah we live in today.

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