Thomas J. Harvey

I was born and raised in Montana and now live in Salt Lake City. I'm a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune but for a number of years I was a foreign correspondent. One assignment took me to Israel during the first Gulf War. I lived for a few weeks in the Old City of Jerusalem. There I noted that three of the world's great religions were worshipping rocks, the spot from where Muhammad ascended to heaven, the remnants of the the Jewish temple and the site believed to be where Jesus was crucified. When I got back to Salt Lake City (where I had lived previously) I entered graduate school in history at the University of Utah. When I was casting about for a topic for a dissertation it came to me that the red rock canyon country of the Utah-Arizona border had served as a shrine of sorts for America in the 20th century. The dissertation became a book, Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley: Making the Modern Old West.