History Department PhD Candidate, Christopher B. Rich Jr. received the Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association with co-authors LaJean Purcell Carruth and department professor Paul Reeve. This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah was honored at the association's 60th Annual Conference in Ogden, Utah over the weekend in early June.

This Abominable Slavery draw extensively on new sources to chronicle the 1852 legislative session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.

Carruth, Rich, and Reeve contextualize the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, they shed new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.