Museum: Arizona Heritage Center

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. 

We are delighted to be welcoming Pat McMahon as the speaker for our December holiday celebration. Over the course of his career, he’s won seven Emmys, is an inductee into several halls of fame, and is a 1993 Arizona Historymaker. He is the winner of both an International Broadcasting Gold Medal and an Edward R. Murrow Award. He is a longstanding fixture of the Phoenix broadcasting scene, serving as a program director, a disc jockey, and a talk-show host, among other positions. But most of us know him as Gerald, the over-privileged brat; Aunt Maud, the elderly storyteller of dark tales; Captain Super, the phony superhero; Hub Kapp, the rock and roll star; and a host of other characters from the Wallace & Ladmo Show. The show was one of the longest running locally produced children’s shows in America. He’s proud of that, and we are too.

Pat was born to life-long vaudeville performers Jack and Adelaide McMahon, who performed a variety-dance act that took the three McMahons worldwide. He was home schooled on the road but later attended a private high school and college in the Midwest. After a stint in the Army, Pat made his way to Arizona in May 1960, where he has made his home ever since.

Oh, the stories he’s able to tell, and we’re looking forward to hearing them all. Pat will tell us about his life and how the Wallace & Ladmo shows impacted him and Arizona history.

The Historical League welcomes guests to our monthly general meetings and programs. Meetings start at 10 a.m. followed by a program and catered lunch. See our website, HistoricalLeague.org for more information.

Join us and Dr. Yolonda Youngs for a presentation on her recent publication Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon.

From the University of Nebraska Press: In Framing Nature Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media. She analyzes and interprets more than fourteen hundred visual artifacts, including postcards, maps, magazine illustrations, and photographs of the Grand Canyon, supplemented with the words and ideas of writers, artists, explorers, and other media makers from 1869 to 2022. Framing Nature provides a novel interpretation of how places, especially national parks, are transformed into national and environmental symbols.

Join us and author David DeJong for a book talk on his most recent work, Damming the Gila: the Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900–1942. Damming the Gila chronicles the history of water rights and farming activities on the Gila River Indian Reservation up to 1942. Centered on the San Carlos Irrigation Project and Coolidge Dam, it details the history and development of the project, including the Gila Decree and the Winters Doctrine.