Series

Arizona Crossroads

Introducing a new book series at the University of Arizona Press, in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society. Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona.

Throughout its history, Arizona has long served as a crossroads between Native peoples, settler colonists, and immigrants from around the world. It has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders. As the series title suggests, we welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic, or geographic (the region, the nation, the borderlands).

Open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history, the series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. We are open to a variety of book formats: monographs, multi-authored works, and edited collections, as well as broader more synthetic works. Interdisciplinary projects that engage the past are encouraged.

For millennia, the place we know as Arizona has been home to Indigenous groups of widely diverse origins who hunted and farmed, traded with one another, migrated, came into conflict, and interacted in ways that reshaped each other’s cultures. In the sixteenth century, it became contested ground between newly arrived Spaniards who claimed the territory as their own and Indigenous people who always outnumbered them and continued to dominate the region throughout the colonial period. By the early nineteenth century, after Mexico won its independence from Spain, migrants from the still-nascent United States moved to the territory in ever-increasing numbers, until by mid-century, the United States provoked a war that ended with its acquisition of half of Mexico’s territory. Thereafter, growing numbers of migrants from around the world converged in Arizona, settling near and alongside one another in mining towns, farming communities, and emergent cities, influencing one another in countless ways. Over time, Anglo-Americans tried to impose their dominance through discriminatory policies, yet other diverse ethnic groups resisted and asserted their agency in ways that transformed the state in fundamental ways. Though not always acknowledged, these shifts have shaped the Arizona we know today; a diverse and ever-growing sunbelt state.

For questions or to submit a proposal, please contact Kristen Buckles, .