Two Historical Works Named Evans Awards Winners for 2024

LOGAN — The Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University has announced the 2024 Evans Awards.

This year’s two recipients are authors whose selected works focus on the importance of documenting individual lives and collective history. One captures Andrew Jenson’s lifelong quest to make the historical record of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints comprehensive and complete. The other centers the stories of Utah’s enslaved Black people as an integral part of the history of Utah and the American West.

The 2024 Evans Biography Award went to Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno, and Amy Tanner Thiriot won the 2024 Evans Handcart Award.

A national jury selected Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno’s volume, “Restless Pilgrim: Andrew Jenson’s Quest for Latter-day Saint History” as the winner of the Evans Biography Award.

“Restless Pilgrim” focuses on Andrew Jenson (1850-1941), a Danish immigrant who was an Assistant Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Neilson and Marianno’s in-depth study of Jenson’s long life and career chronicles trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions. It also tells of his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of Latter-day Saint history.

“Slavery in Zion: A Documentary & Genealogical History of Black Lives & Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862” combines genealogical and historical research to reveal events and relationships unknown or misunderstood for well over a century. In this book, Thiriot documents around 100 enslaved or indentured Black men, women and children in Utah Territory.

“Slavery in Zion” earned this year’s Handcart Award, with one juror on the regional committee noting: “This book is a meticulously researched reclamation project that bears significant fruit. This work corrects some historical errors and illuminates other areas, while acknowledging that there is still work to be done. It makes contributions not only to the history of slavery in the Utah Territory, but also adds to the broader history of slavery in the American West.”

These prizes aim to recognize the best of research and writing in biographies, autobiographies and memoirs that focus on the stories of people who have shaped the character of the Interior West. The Evans Biography Award comes with a cash prize of $10,000, and the Evans Handcart Award winner is presented with $2,500.

The prizes are made possible through an endowment created in 1983 by the family of David Woolley Evans and Beatrice Cannon Evans.

Center Director Molly Cannon remarked: “The Evans Awards offer an incredible opportunity for Utah State University to showcase pinnacle works of the American West. We are grateful for the Evans Family and their continued support of writers and scholars in our communities.”

The national jury named one additional work as Evans Biography Award Finalist from the over 40 submissions received. Namely, Richard L. Saunders’ “Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition,” is a biography of a prominent Western historian, and how, despite personal struggles, his commitment to serious scholarship launched new ways of understanding, studying and retelling history.

Awardees were chosen from works published in 2022 and 2023, and submitted to the national and regional juries for consideration. Winners will be honored at an awards ceremony occurring in tandem with the Arrington Mormon History Lecture on the Logan campus on Oct. 11.

The Mountain West Center for Regional Studies is an outreach center in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences that works to provide public programs, student scholarships, research and program funding, visiting scholars, and other projects directed at enhancing the work of Utah State University.