John Wayne was born in Iowa and lived for most of his adult life in California. Yet, he spent many years exploring, living, and investing in Arizona, where he produced his own films, raised cattle, operated a game ranch, and was seemingly everywhere at once. Wayne remains an iconic presence in American popular culture. In […]
Arizona is the only state in the Union that has been documented as having Africanized bees in every single county. The story of Africanized bees in Arizona is very much a story about the Southwest, and its distinct differences from the rest of the United States. The bees show us that we are living and […]
Race has been much contested in U.S. history. Yet it has never been a single thing. Nor has it always been the same thing. Race has been part of a changing national identity. More personally, race has been part of variable individual identity. Who was white, who was Indian, who was black, for example, has […]
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 Miyatake, […]
Ghost towns dot Arizona's landscape and provide unique insights into a diverse history. Some ghost towns tell a boom-to-bust story with few remaining traces of the people who once lived there, while others, like Jerome, have become thriving tourist destinations. Many are old mining locations that once bustled with life, while others tell more modern […]
The deep time perspective that archaeology and related disciplines provide about natural hazards, environmental change, and human adaptation is a valuable supplement to historical records and can help modern societies make decisions affecting social sustainability and human safety. Examples include scientific evidence that virtually all prehistoric farming cultures in Arizona and the Southwest eventually surpassed […]
Arizona has become a focus for the location of private, for-profit prisons. The state also has one of the highest expenditure rates for corrections. Are we getting what we paid for? Post will address the history of for-profit prisons, the inter-connections with issues of immigration and racial disparities, and the track record of for-profit prisons […]
Hang on to your hats as you ride the trails beside some of Arizona’s most wicked renegades during a time when massacres, mayhem and mischief ran rampant throughout Arizona Territory. Learn the sordid details of desperadoes such as cattle/horse rustler and murderer Augustine Chacon who claimed he killed over fifty men, ladies-man Buckskin Frank Leslie […]
Consider the taco, that favorite treat, a staple of Mexican and Mexican American cooking and an old standby on an Arizonan’s plate. The corn in the tortilla comes from Mexico, the cheese from the Sahara, the lettuce from Egypt, the onion from Syria, the tomatoes from South America, the chicken from Indochina, and the beef […]
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