Ghost Towns of the Second World War: Arizona’s Historic Military Sites

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

During the Second World War, Arizona’s open spaces, sparse population, and mild weather made it an ideal location for a wide range of military operations including combat training, POW camps, and flight training. By war’s end, more pilots received their wings in Arizona than in any other state. This presentation discusses the war’s impact on […]

Free

Desert Trader: Goldie Tracy Richmond, Trader, Trapper, and Quiltmaker

The Museum of Casa Grande 110 W. Florence Blvd, Casa Grande, AZ, United States

Goldie Tracy Richmond came to southwestern Arizona in 1927 where she lived in a canvas lean-to. To survive, Goldie mined, ran traplines, and operated Tracy’s Trading Post, living among the Tohono O’odham people for four decades. She was a large woman, and the stories told by the O’odham people of Goldie’s life are legendary. Goldie […]

Free

Written in Thread: Arizona Women’s History Preserved in Their Quilts

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

Join Stevenson as she traces Arizona history through women who recorded pieces of their lives in their needlework.  Beginning with 1860s Mexican women, through 1990s Hopi women, this presentation introduces women who pioneered Arizona through quilts they stitched. Some of the women featured are Atanacia Santa Cruz Hughes, Tucson; Viola Slaughter, Southeastern Arizona; Alice Gillette Haught, […]

Free

The New Deal in Arizona

The Museum of Casa Grande 110 W. Florence Blvd, Casa Grande, AZ, United States

Arizona’s New Deal built sidewalks, post offices, provided school lunches and outhouses. It produced roadside shrines and monuments to encourage tourism, check dams and mud stock tanks to support Arizona ranchers, as well as golf courses and pools for recreation. The federal investment in the built and cultural landscape of 1930s Arizona and the nation […]

Free

Arizona’s Civilian Conservation Corps and Our National Parks and Forests

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

In 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression, the CCC was born. The program was designed to help unemployed and untrained young men learn new skills and earn money to support their families. CCCers fervently claim that the skill-building experiences forever changed their lives. These men built the roads, trails, picnic areas, ranger stations, […]

Free

The Eagle and the Archaeologists: The Lindberghs’ 1929 Southwest Aerial Survey

The Museum of Casa Grande 110 W. Florence Blvd, Casa Grande, AZ, United States

Charles Lindbergh is best known for his famous 1927 flight across the Atlantic Ocean.  But few realize that Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, played a brief but important role in archaeology.  In 1929 they teamed up with noted archaeologist Alfred Kidder to conduct an unprecedented aerial photographic survey of Southwest prehistoric sites and geologic features […]

Free

Art of the Internment Camps: Culture Behind Barbed Wire

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

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 states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Government photographers Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Ansel Adams documented the internment, and artists Toyo […]

Free

Arizona Kicks on Route 66

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

U.S. Route 66, known as the “Mother Road,” was built in 1926. It ran from Chicago to L. A. During the depression of the 1930s, it became the major path by which people migrated west, seeking work, warm weather and new opportunities. Shore shares the history of Route 66 in Arizona, including the impact it […]

Free

Cowboys and Cowgirls: Icons of the American West

Dorothy Powell Senior Adult Center 405 E. 6th St., Casa Grande, AZ, United States

Few symbols have been more durable than the American cowboy. This program will give an overview of this populist figure, whose image was first defined by painters Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Also important to the story are brave cowgirls and the Mexican vaqueros. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show showcased mythic cowboy culture, with […]

Free

Fill out the info below to sign up for our E-Newsletter.