The headline brings an immediate chuckle: “How to be Plump.” Say what? Yes, in Victorian times, this 1988 book declares, there was a very different...
Get Your Kicks on Route 66 with Doc and Wyatt
Did you know that Doc and Wyatt got their kicks on Arizona’s Route 66 decades before Tod and Buz? Well, maybe not exactly, but they did get their...
Mexican Food: An Arizona Favorite
“The cultural influences of Spaniards and Mexicans were indelibly printed on Arizona long before territorial times,” notes Daphne Overstreet in her...
The Nation Marched Forward During March
Lots of locales in the United States have good reason to celebrate or commemorate the month of March. It was March 2 of 1836 when Texas declared its...
The Dead Man In The Picture
One of the most iconic paintings of the old west is "The Last Spike", created in 1881 by Thomas Hill to commemorate the completion of the...
Texas Feud
The last major Texas feud has been explored in No Hope For Heaven, No Fear of Hell by James C. Kearney, Bill Stein and James Smallwood (University...
A Grave Discovery
When Ronnie Atnip returned on another field trip, he was drawn to the Sears-Doss Cemetery located near the Hardin farm. To his surprise, Atnip found...
The Birth of a Wicked Son Reimagined
Notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin was in the midst of writing about the bloody career surrounding his life story when lawman John Selman...
A Mule For Sylvia Durando
Comanche Station opens with an 11-minute montage setup featuring hardly any dialogue. A loner, Jefferson Cody (played by Randolph Scott), is moving...
Why Does Arizona Have That Diagonal Boundary Line?
Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican War in 1848 the boundary line between the United States and Mexico in what would become...
JPS Brown: An American Original
One day in 1937, in the bar of Tucson’s Santa Rita Hotel, the cowboy-actor Tom Mix gave seven-year-old Joe Brown a pair of buckskin chaps with...
Jim Leavy, Gunfighter
Jim Leavy was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1842. His name was often misspelled Levy and this has led some to believe he was Jewish. He came to America...