Long work hours and blurry lines between personal and professional lives is hardly a modern dilemma. But imagine if your employer controlled not just your hours and your paycheck, but where you spent your off hours and how you spent your money. Employees of the P.W. Madsen Furniture Store knew just how that felt.
Mary Nakaishi and her husband Uke devoted their life's work to helping Ogden's poor get back on their feet and earned the reputation of Ogden's "Angels of 25th Street".
Learn how Ogden's families and business-owners used the prohibition against alcohol to invent new styles of work -- and how law enforcement worked to stop them.
Confections are a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States and Utahns currently buy candy at the highest rate in the nation -- almost double the US average. It's been that way for at least a century.
Starting in the 1840s, government explorers began to survey and map the Intermountain West more thoroughly. Meet Leonard Swett, a wealthy young man from Chicago who came West with the U.S. Geological Survey.
It might be easy to think that the production of folk art isn't really "work." But whether or not folk artists make a living through their creativity, their labors require hard-earned mastery of skills. Learn about two Utah women whose art was their work.
The depth, the dark, and the dangers inherent in coal mining created a uniquely hazardous work environment for miners in Utah at the turn of the twentieth century.
Learn how one family went literally from "bags to riches" and how a son honored his mother's legacy by naming after her one of Salt Lake's most noted buildings.
Much has been made of the early Mormons' communal work ethic and the effective redistribution of resources within their communities. But how did they actually organize these efforts?
Hill Air Force Base is Utah's sixth largest employer and military spending creates over $9 billion in economic activity for the State. Learn about the historic roots of Utah's "Military Industrial Complex."
Wings flashing in the sunlight, raucous calls filling the air, and tons of bird excrement coating the rocks. Learn about guano gathering out on the Great Salt Lake.
The Mexican Mural Renaissance is one of the most famous art movements in modern history. Learn how a blond-haired, blued-eyed, 20-year-old from Salt Lake City became a Mexican Muralist.
A lot of Americans still dream of the American West as a place of freedom and opportunity. But for workers at the turn of the twentieth century, it was never quite that simple.
Learn about Utah's convict labor system and how prisoners actually formed the backbone of some of our early public works projects -- especially road construction.
In 1914, the state of Utah put labor activist Joe Hill on trial for murder in a case that remains controversial to this day. Learn about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the woman who fought hard for Hill's pardon.
Tourists and Utahns alike enjoy the Beehive State for its many opportunities for outdoor recreation. Learn how much of that recreation originated in the way people worked.
We no longer work as close to the land as Utah's indigenous people once did. But that doesn't mean we don't work for the same reasons. Learn how Timpanogos Utes made a living and how we might relate.
Irrigation was essential to early Mormons' ability to survive in Utah. Learn how they labored physically, intellectually, and communally to make the desert bloom.
American industrialism at the turn of the 20th century brought Utah women out of their homes and into the workplace. There they faced inequality and wage disparity.
Utahns have looked to the mountains for minerals, lumber, water, and even grazing lands. But how were our mountains re-imagined into the skiing playgrounds we know today?
