Editor's Note

With this issue, the Journal of Arizona History turns sixty. First published in the spring of 1960, the JAH has gone through many changes over the past six decades. But one thing has not changed—the commitment to promoting research and writing on Arizona's history. We at the Arizona Historical Society (AHS) are proud of the JAH's past and are even more excited about its future. It is fitting, then, that this issue of the journal looks at how history is made—not by the people in the past, but by historians (and sometimes others) after the events in question occur. People in the past, after all, didn't live in "history"—they lived in their own present. Thus, it is the job of historians to "make" history. Each of the articles in this issue pulls back the curtain to help us think about how history is constructed and, ultimately, disseminated.

The issue begins with two short pieces to commemorate and contextualize this important anniversary for the Journal. In the first piece, AHS executive director W. James Burns places the JAH within the larger context of the Arizona Historical Society. The AHS has new mission, vision, and guiding statements, as the organization moves forward in the twenty-first century. As Burns notes, the JAH will continue to be a cornerstone program of the AHS and will help connect people through the power of Arizona's history.

In the second piece, I examine the founding of this publication—then called Arizoniana—in 1960 and look at how it changed over the course of its first twelve years. Initially, each issue was small (the first one consisted of eight pages), and it featured news of the society more than original scholarship. Yet, over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the modern Journal of Arizona History began to take shape (the name was changed in 1965). Four different editors—all current or former University of Arizona graduate students—ran the journal during its first twelve years. Each put his own stamp on the journal, making improvements large and small along the way. The journal changed quite a bit—for the better, in my opinion—through its first dozen years, and Arizona history is far richer because of the work of the historians and editors who have made the JAH possible.

In the third article, William F. Manger examines how history can be distorted if researchers are not careful to fact-check their evidence. In this particular case, Manger explores the use—and misuse—of two photo postcards from the Mexican Revolution. Both postcards have been erroneously connected to photographer Albert W. Lohn, a Chicago native who, as an adult, moved to southern California, then to Sinaloa, Mexico, and finally to Nogales, Arizona. Manger unpacks the local myths that emerged about each postcard. The first, a postcard featuring an image of an African American man in military attire, was taken in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the early years of the Revolution. The man on the postcard was misidentified, and some local historians in Sinaloa have mistakenly claimed that it was Albert W. Lohn in the image. The second postcard, taken in August 1914 at the bridge connecting El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, features three generals, Álvaro Obregón, Francisco (Pancho) Villa, and John J. Pershing. Because Lohn appropriated the photograph and sold it out of his own studio in Nogales, many locals there mistakenly believed that he took the photograph and that the meeting of the three generals occurred along the border at Nogales. In both examples of misidentification and misattribution, the myths about the postcards have frequently been repeated—even in some published books. Manger encourages all historians to interrogate photographs as rigorously as they would any source evidence to avoid such mistakes.

In the fourth article, John Mack examines the commemorative efforts surrounding the reinterment of the body of Mathew Juan, a member of the Akimel O'odham tribe who was the first Arizonan to die in battle during World War I. Juan died on a battlefield in France in May 1917 and was originally buried...