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Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918. By Jeffrey Nichols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. viii + 247 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, illustrations. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN 0-252-02768-X.
The history of criminal law may not at first appear to be a field with wide application, but a closer examination reveals that the field can suggest new interpretations of social, religious, women's, local, regional, and business history. Such is the case in this most recent contribution to the story of prostitution in nineteenth-century America. Jeffrey Nichols, an assistant professor of history at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, uses that city's lengthy and contested responses to prostitution as a template for understanding Mormon-Gentile relations, ways in which local business people accommodate the existence of prostitution, the influence of the trade on local and regional politics, and creative uses of municipal law in the American West.
When the Latter-Day Saints moved to Salt Lake City, their goal...