Deseret Evening News (Great Salt Lake City [Utah])
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
6,524 issues from 1889 to 1910, published in Salt Lake City, Utah, digitised for Chronicling America.
Within three years after Mormon pioneers settled the valley of the Great Salt Lake, Brigham Young established the Deseret News. Taking its name from the old term for the Utah Territory – a “deseret” is a honeybee, according to the Book of Mormon – the newspaper first appeared on June 15, 1850, on a $60 press that had traveled 1,100 miles by ox-cart across the country to Salt Lake City. The News began as a weekly; its first edition masthead proclaiming “Truth and Liberty.” As the official organ of the Church of the Latter-day Saints, the newspaper published gospel-related items and espoused Mormon theology. Yet it also covered national events, for Brigham Young did not want readers to find themselves isolated from the “outside world.”
In 1865, the paper became a semiweekly, appearing on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and two years later it added a daily edition called the Deseret Evening News. The newspaper printed its first “action” photographs on May 12, 1900, when it printed five images of a mine explosion at Scofield, Utah, which killed over 200 men in the nation’s worst mine disaster up to that time. Appearing eleven days after the blast, the grim photos depicted wagons loaded with coffins and stretcher-bearers bringing out the dead.
After the turn of the century, the paper began to attract readers with innovative large-type, banner headlines that extended across the entire front page. One of these appeared on September 7, 1901, the day after President William McKinley was…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress