This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation’s growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.
W. Paul Reeve is the chair of the History Department and Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. His book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, (Oxford, 2015) received three best book awards. He is author of Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, published by Deseret Book in 2023 with a foreword by Darius Gray. He is Project Manager and General Editor of an award-winning digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Latter-day Saints baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. The database is live at www.CenturyofBlackMormons.org. With Christopher Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth, he is the author of This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah. The primary source documents upon which the narrative history is based are publicly available at www.ThisAbominableSlavery.org.
Christopher Rich is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. He has a BA in history from Brigham Young University, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and an LLM from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. He spent 11 years as a Judge Advocate in the United States Army and continues to serve as a Reservist. He lives in Cottonwood Heights, UT with his wife and two children.
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