Archives West Finding Aid

In 1964, History professors A. R. Mortensen and Gregory Crampton conceived the University of Utah's American West Center (originally called the Western History Center) as an institution devoted exclusively to research on the American West. As a part of its mission to create and disseminate knowledge about the American West, the center established the ongoing Ethnic Oral Histories Project to explore the experiences of Utah members of Native American and ethnic immigrant communities, including Italian Americans.

Many Italians immigrated to Utah during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some came because they were Mormon converts, more were attracted to Utah as laborers for the state's railroad and mining industries in Salt Lake, Weber and Carbon Counties. Although varying degrees of strife existed between the Italian immigrants, other residents of Utah, the Ku Klux Klan, and even between immigrants from Northern and Southern Italy, Italian Americans developed active communities like the "Little Italy" near Salt Lake City's Rio Grande Station and established lodges and societies in mining towns like Bingham and Castle Gate. Miners joined labor unions and were active in several strikes in the early twentieth century. The interviews in this collection focus on these early days, but they also more loosely encompass the Italian American experience in Utah from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-late twentieth century when these oral histories were compiled.