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  • Introduction:What's Arizona Got to Do with It?
  • Katherine G. Morrissey (bio)

What do you know about Arizona history? How do you know your Arizona history? The answer to those questions might vary according to who you are, where you are from, and what brought you to this particular issue of the Journal of Arizona History. Maybe you have heard family stories that are intertwined with this place. Maybe you have studied history in school. Maybe you have read the work of Arizona historians. Maybe you have researched and written about the region's history.

I have been reflecting on these questions. A good bit of my own knowledge comes from academic historians. When I arrived at the University of Arizona in the 1990s, hired to replace Harwood Hinton, historian of the American West and Arizona, my knowledge of the state's history had been largely gained through books, research, and conversations with my graduate advisors.1 From my MA advisor, Charles S. Peterson, I had learned much about Arizona's Mormon history and from my PhD advisor, Howard R. Lamar, there were lessons about its political territorial history and complex frontier past.2 Those academic lessons intermingled with my cultural appreciation of the Southwest, gained from friends and [End Page 341] family who lived in the region, perhaps, or from Arizona Highways, western movies, and novels. I certainly recognized that I had a lot more to learn about my new home. So, I spent as much time as I could that first year on sojourns through the state, exploring its landscapes, meeting its peoples, stopping at historic sites and museums, and delving into its past. By the time I began to teach the history of Arizona and the Southwest, I had built on this earlier foundation. (Even so there are differences between local knowledge and book learning; I still mispronounced certain place names—much to the amusement of my students.) I have continued the practice of learning through travel and from Arizonans, whether speaking with audiences under the sponsorship of the Arizona Humanities Council, following the Arizona Women's Heritage Trail, or participating in the annual Arizona History Convention.

Along with other such Arizona cultural institutions, the Journal of Arizona History (JAH) has been a rich resource through which to learn about the region's history, to reckon with its past, and to consider its future. This special issue continues that tradition. When JAH editor David Turpie conceived of the plan for this issue a couple years back, he described its intent as a "state of the field" issue and asked me to serve as its guest editor. It has been an honor to work with the Arizona Historical Society publications crew. Our task was to gather together historians who have researched and written on a diverse set of topics related to Arizona's past. We invited them to share their knowledge, to evaluate the existing scholarship, and to offer suggestions for future directions. We asked for essays that speak to the relevant historiography of a particular topic, but also wanted the authors to consider new directions and opportunities for research. What do we know about Arizona and the Civil War, for example? What does Arizona's past contribute to border studies, environmental history, Mexican American studies, gender history, Indigenous studies, or Mormon history, for example? What else do we need to investigate about the state's political history, public health, race relations, and cultural history? How do these regional histories inform larger historical narratives? We dangled the opportunity to make a statement and to highlight excellent scholarship. Giving the reins to a talented group of scholars meant relinquishing interpretive control. And we have all benefited as a result. [End Page 342]

From the start I realized that we could not be comprehensive—there are many more historians whose work deserves to be included here, and many more topics to consider. Our emphasis, as a quick review of the table of contents reveals, is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although we have crowded a baker's dozen between the covers, there was not room to include more articles, even as we expanded into a double issue. Arizona...

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