Arizona

Robert W. Merry | Winter 2010

President James K. Polk expanded U.S. territory by a third by war-making and shrewd negotiating.

IN FEBRUARY 28, 1848, President James K. Polk received a visit from Ambrose Sevier of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bearing bad news.

The History and Stark Beauty of Tuscon

Lawrence W. Cheek | October 2000

A city where the desert is everywhere, where sprawl into magnificent desolation is the main industry, whose oldest building is still its most beautiful, whose surrounding mountains are its soul: Lawrence W. Cheek explains why American Heritage’s Great American Place Award for the year 2000 goes to…

Who Was Wyatt Earp?

Allen Barra | December 1998

From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth

Late in his life, Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darli

The Real Antique Land

September 1995

Newcomers continue to challenge Arizona’s implacable desert.

Coronado Country

November 1993

Arizona’s spare, seemingly depopulated landscape has in fact been teeming with travelers for four centuries.

“All this land used to be grass that came up as high as a horse’s belly,” Tom Hunt, a friend who is serving as my guide, tells me as we drive through Arizona’s Sonora Desert, “but now it’s all mesquite.” I look around at the desert dense with the wiry shrublike trees.

A Heritage Preserved

T. H. Watkins | April/May 1982

Fort Adobe

The building shown below may look like a low-rise adobe condominium, and in a sense, that is what it is today—someone’s house.

Headin’ for the (Almost) Last Roundup

T. H. Watkins | February/March 1978

Organizers held an old-fashioned cattle drive to commemorate the cowboy's role in winning the West, but, as they say, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

The cowboys are gone, and so are the critters, Owen Ulph tells us in “The Cowboy and the Critter” on the preceding pages. The West, Ulph says, will never see their like again.

American Characters

T. H. Watkins | December 1977

Western miners, the hard-rock stiffs, were as tough and horny-handed a breed of men as any in the world.

The man and the face are anonymous-and familiar.

The Hopi Way

Alvin M. Josephy Jr. | February 1973

Isolation ends for “the People of Peace”

Perched on the edge of a rocky mesa six hundred feet above the desert of northeastern Arizona is the Hopi Indian village of Hotevilla.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.