Utah received special one-volume treatment among the histories produced by Hubert Howe Bancroft, nineteenth-century San Francisco entrepreneur. He acquired a considerable library of books and newspapers, and for Utah, manuscripts extracted from the Church Historian's Office. He hired writers (Alfred Bates wrote most of the Utah volume), and aimed to please his audiences. LDS Church authorities read and made suggestions on the work before it went to press. His History of Utah (1889) was popular for years.

In Orson F. Whitney the people of Utah found a historian of their own who undertook the prolonged task of writing a full-length history. His History of Utah (four vols., 1892-1904) placed emphasis on political, judicial, and legal history, with heavy use of documents. After treating the coming of the Mormons, the volumes chronicled events year by year. Volume four contained some 350 biographies. The four-volume work completed, Whitney turned to write Utah's first school textbook: The Making of a State; A School History of Utah (1908). In 1916 he produced a one-volume Popular History of Utah, in which he traced mainly political themes through the territorial period, with chapters on the years to 1916.

Over the years five persons (including Whitney) produced three- and four-volume works. Noble Warrum put out Utah Since Statehood (three vols., 1919), which, while mainly political, but much more or a large variety of topics. J. Cecil Alter, who made many contributions to Utah history, wrote Utah, the Storied Domain: A Documentary History (three vols., 1932). Wain Sutton edited Utah, A Centennial History (three vols., 1949), bringing together signed articles on a variety of subjects. Wayne Stout put out his History of Utah (three vols., 1967-1971), which chronicled the years 1870 to 1970. Heavy with long quotations from mainly printed sources, the work shows strong anti-non-Mormon bias. In none of these works is there synthesis, rather year-to-year chronicles using mainly quotations from documents.