As we honor our veterans this month we will be joined by Diane Burke Fessler, author of No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses of World War II. She wrote her first book to honor the nurses of the 1940s. Her aunt was an army nurse who wrote letters every week from her stations overseas and led Fessler to want to write about her. After attending a reunion of the 166th General Hospital in 1989 with “Auntie Raine” (Lorraine Krause Taylor), she interviewed and wrote the oral histories of more than 200 nurses whose stories had not been told. Covering all theaters of war, the nurses told of their overseas assignments, including the first flight nurses, women at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines, and African American nurses who served in a segregated U.S. Army.
Diane Burke Fessler grew up in Chicago, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Journalism, and lives in Phoenix. She also contributed a chapter about women in Arizona during the 1940s to a book titled Arizona Goes To War: The Home Front and Front Lines During World War II, published by University of Arizona Press.

Join us at the Arizona Heritage Center on Friday, November 8 from 4-7 PM to explore history’s wild side. Animal meet and greets and hands on activities free with museum admission. Visit our friends from the Phoenix Zoo, Phoenix Herpetological Society, and Tempe Public Library.

No pre-registration required, but if you would like to purchase museum admission in advance, click here!

Contact Ardyn Shepard at [email protected] with questions.

Join us and Dr. Laura Muñoz to discuss her most recent work, Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics of Educational Equality.  Dr. Muñoz comes from a family of teachers, including her maternal great-grandmother who taught in the early 1900s in Texas public schools. She is the inspiration behind Dr. Munoz’s book, Desert Dreams a study of Arizona students and teachers in the territorial and early statehood days. Desert Dreams documents the unknown contributions of Mexican Americans in founding, shaping, and participating in Arizona education since 1871.

Dr. Muñoz is currently an associate professor of history and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She earned her Ph.D. in American History at Arizona State University.