AZ Speaks

The promise of unimagined riches is what brought many of the earliest colonizers to the Arizona Territory. Following the trail to the discovery of the mother lode, they built, then […]

For centuries, Hopi men grew cotton and wove the fibers into blankets and clothing. In the 1880s, with the arrival of Anglo missionaries and government officials, quilting was introduced to […]

The dividing line of the U.S.-Mexico border may be the most significant feature of the Arizona-Sonora borderland today, but the region is also at the center of major north-south corridors […]

How did the Apache impact late prehistoric peoples? Research provides evidence of ancestral Apaches in the southern Southwest as early as A.D. 1300. Evidence comes from chronometric dates obtained from […]

Arizona’s rivers were first, lush green ribbons of life through a desert landscape. They became sustaining paths, first for the indigenous, later for immigrants leaving wagon tracks. On the Salt […]

During WWII a select group of young Navajo men enlisted in the Marines with a unique weapon. Using the Navajo language, they devised a secret code that the enemy never […]

In 1989, Alan Day lobbied the United States Congress and was granted approval to create our country’s first government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary on his South Dakota ranch. At the time, […]

In this presentation, Mr. Dart shows and discusses Native American ceramic styles that characterized specific peoples and eras in the U.S. Southwest prior to about 1450, and talks about how […]

When the first dining guide to the Valley of the Sun appeared in 1978, the authors had to explain what “sushi” was. Fast forward four decades, and Arizonans are munching […]

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1942 WWII Executive Order 9066 forced the removal of nearly 125,000 Japanese-American citizens from the west coast, incarcerating them in ten remote internment camps in seven […]