arizona history news

The political boundaries of North America have gone through many changes. As part of New Spain, Central America was known as the Captaincy General of Guatemala, or the Kingdom of Guatemala. The territory of Mexico used to contain the entire southwestern United States, and extended as far north as th...

Salt River Valley, Arizona, 1934. Cartography by T.A. Hayden. In 1934, the Phoenix valley was mostly farmland thanks to the incredibly successful damming of the Salt River with the Roosevelt Dam via the Salt River Project i...

One hundred and sixty one years ago, the American Civil War was raging all across the country. During the height of this conflict, The Territory of Arizona was officially established in February of 1863. Efforts to create the Arizona Territory had been ongoing since at least 1856, with a few maps sh...

Oh, people might have read John Wesley Powell’s 1875 book, ultimately titled “The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons,” but the book wasn’t so much a deep dive into the size, beauty and geology of the Grand Canyon as much as it was a tale of the Wild West. “It was meant to be a geolog...

Our February Map of the Month is an early edition of this map of “Oregon, Upper California, and New Mexico” published in 1849. It depicts the western United States shortly after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, showing the new border and territories gained by the United States after the Mexi...

View the full Williams-Grand Canyon News article, Dutton’s Atlas: How cartography helped Grand Canyon become grand, written by Joe Giddens, and published on October 12, 2021, at the following URL: https://www.williamsnews.com/news/2021/oct/12/duttons-atlas-how-cartogr…...

Greater Arizona Collection Curator Renee James Hello, my name is Renee D. James, and I am the curator for the Greater Arizona Collection. I hold an M.A. in History and a Certificate in Archival Management and Historical Editing fr...