Entrepreneurs offering assorted “get rich quick” schemes and “cure-alls” have visited Arizona since the early days. Benefitting from tales of abundant resources in the territory, limited law enforcement and communication, a scoundrel could create enticing promises of wealth and health without much external oversight. Newspapers often fanned the hysteria only to later denounce and expose […]

The Colorado, the Gila, the Salt, the Verde, the Hassayampa, the Santa Cruz: Arizona’s rivers were lush green ribbons of life flowing through a desert landscape. They became sustaining paths for indigenous traders and immigrants leaving wagon tracks and settlements. The Hohokam built vast canals from the Salt to direct irrigation water for crops. European […]

Throughout the Southwest, tourists and locals encounter a range of Indigenous art, from manufactured and imported cultural appropriations to fine art in galleries and museums. The state’s creative Indigenous communities are sometimes lost in what is popularly featured as Native American Art. In this presentation, Diné jeweler Nanibaa Beck will highlight contemporary Native American Art, […]

This presentation covers humankind’s water use and food supply interactions with Arizona’s ecology from Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to prehistoric irrigation canals, contemporary Hopi and Tohono O’odham dry farming, and present-day American farmers. We will examine how overhunting and climate change affected the wooly mammoth populations and the agriculture experiments that followed. From early attempts to […]

Many Arizonans call the Sonoran Desert and its striking landscapes home. Long before our urban centers and city lights lit up the dark desert skies, the Tohono O’odham were cultivating and shaping the land with abundant agriculture—from squash and beans to corn and cotton. For generations they passed down their rich knowledge and culture grown […]

Many Arizonans call the Sonoran Desert and its striking landscapes home. Long before our urban centers and city lights lit up the dark desert skies, the Tohono O’odham were cultivating and shaping the land with abundant agriculture—from squash and beans to corn and cotton. For generations they passed down their rich knowledge and culture grown […]

The Colorado, the Gila, the Salt, the Verde, the Hassayampa, the Santa Cruz: Arizona’s rivers were lush green ribbons of life flowing through a desert landscape. They became sustaining paths for indigenous traders and immigrants leaving wagon tracks and settlements. The Hohokam built vast canals from the Salt to direct irrigation water for crops. European […]

This presentation examines the remarkable living structures built by the people who first lived in the canyons of the Sierra Ancha wilderness during the early Middle Ages. The architectural dwellings reflect the culture and history of these people and help us understand their contributions to life in the Arizona desert. The presentation includes numerous photos […]

It is one of the most uplifting – yet often forgotten – stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust. In the early 1940s, the Dominican Republic was the only sovereign country to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees. About 750 German and Austrian Jews found a safe haven on an abandoned banana plantation in a […]