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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on Monday's Access Utah Jun 13, 2016

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It was a meme before meme was a thing. Pulitzer prize-winning author, Idaho native, and Harvard Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich observed in 1976 in her first scholarly paper (on funeral sermons for women) that “well-behaved women seldom make history.” The comment became a popular slogan appearing on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, websites and blogs. In her book by the same title (2007), Ulrich explains how the phenomenon happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. The women she writes about range from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote “The Book of the City of Ladies,” to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of “A Room of One's Own.” Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.

"Historic Tales Of Utah" On Thursday's Access Utah Jun 09, 2016

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Eileen Hallet Stone is out with a second collection from her popular Salt Lake Tribune “Living History” column. In “Historic Tales of Utah” (The History Press), Stone tells many of the stories of Utah: “Big Bill” Haywood, vilified by the New York Times as “the most feared figure in America,” women bruised on the front lines of suffrage battles, Chinese “paper sons and daughters,” heroic Northern Ute firefighters, downtown Salt Lake City’s “Wall Street of the West,” the off-road cyclist known as the “Bedouin of the Desert,” and Utah’s love affair with sweets.

Sarah Manguso And "Ongoingness: The End Of A Diary" On Wednesday's Access Utah Jun 08, 2016

Show notes

In "Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. She says she wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened. But she was terrified that she might forget something, she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.

Sherman Alexie on Tuesday's Access Utah Jun 07, 2016

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Sherman Alexie is a major voice in contemporary American literature. He is the author of twenty books including “Reservation Blues” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” The award-winning, and widely banned, young adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” won him the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Elizabeth Church and "Atomic Weight of Love" on Monday's Access Utah Jun 06, 2016

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For Meridian Wallace—and many other smart, driven women of the 1940s—being ambitious meant being an outlier. Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother’s sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn’t expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he’s recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him.

Harry Parker and "Anatomy of a Soldier" on Thursday's Access Utah Jun 02, 2016

Show notes

Let’s imagine a man called Captain Tom Barnes, aka BA5799, who’s leading British troops in the war zone. And two boys growing up together in that war zone, sharing a prized bicycle and flying kites before finding themselves estranged once foreign soldiers appear in their countryside. And then there’s the man who trains one of them to fight against the other’s father and all these infidel invaders. Then imagine the family and friends who radiate out from these lives, people on all sides of this conflict where virtually everyone is caught up in the middle of something unthinkable.

Eric Nuzum and "Giving Up The Ghost" on Wednesday's Access Utah Jun 01, 2016

Show notes

Eric Nuzum is afraid of the supernatural, and for good reason: As a high school oddball in Canton, Ohio, during the early 1980s, he became convinced that he was being haunted by the ghost of a little girl in a blue dress who lived in his parents’ attic. It began as a weird premonition during his dreams, something that his quickly diminishing circle of friends chalked up as a way to get attention. It ended with Nuzum in a mental ward, having apparently destroyed his life before it truly began. The only thing that kept him from the brink: his friendship with a girl named Laura, a classmate who was equal parts devoted friend and enigmatic crush. With the kind of strange connection you can only forge when you’re young, Laura walked Eric back to “normal”—only to become a ghost herself in a tragic twist of fate.

"The Mirror Test" By J. Kael Weston On Wednesday's Access Utah May 25, 2016

Show notes

For soldiers who have received a severe wound to the face, there is a moment during their recovery when they must look upon their reconstructed appearance for the first time. This is known as "the mirror test." Utah native J. Kael Weston spent seven years on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan working for the U.S. State Department in some of the most dangerous frontline locations. Upon his return home, he asked himself: When will these wars end? How will they be remembered? And what lessons can we learn from them?

"Through Her Eyes" On Tuesday's Access Utah May 24, 2016

Show notes

Women capture Utah: They photograph fires, floods, crime scenes, politicians, sports, the arts, the outdoors, families, clergy and countless personal stories. "Through Her Eyes," a photojournalism exhibit at Salt Lake City Library's main branch is sharing Utah's stories as captured through the lenses of 20 of the state's female news photographers. The exhibit, in the Lower Urban Room Gallery, will be on display through June 24.

"Daredevils" By Shawn Vestal On Monday's Access Utah May 23, 2016

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At the heart of Shawn Vestal's debut novel "Daredevils," set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s, is fifteen-year-old Loretta, who slips out of her bedroom every evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon fundamentalist parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids.

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