Arizona occupies a limited space in the American imagination. The Apaches, the gunfight at the OK Corral, and Barry Goldwater summarize much of the popular knowledge of this state. The biggest task of anyone who wants the public to pay attention to Arizona’s complex and rich history is to capture the reader’s attention. This Thomas E. Sheridan does in a magnificent way. His prose is entrancing, an unexpected pleasure for those of us familiar with wooden, textbook treatments of state histories. Because of his artful writing, Sheridan leads us to think about the land and people of Arizona in a new way. He is carrying on a brief but glorious historical and literary tradition pioneered by Paul Horgan.
Sheridan is in love with his subject, but the lyrical prose is grounded in a wealth of scholarship and organized around concepts that make sense. He divides Arizona’s past into three phases: incorporation, the gradual inclusion of Arizona in a developing world system; extraction, the organized exploitation of the land’s natural resources; and transformation, the emergence of Arizona as a vibrant urban, metropolitan society. He calls his theoretical approach “political ecology,” which he defines as the unfolding exchange “between political and economic forces and local cultural, demographic, and ecological factors” (p. xvi). Basically, he sees nature as the limiting factor in human history, taking his cue, appropriately, from one Annie Peaches, a Western Apache who said, “The land is always stalking people” (p. xvii).
Among other books about Arizona there are surprisingly few thoroughly scholarly surveys of the state’s history from pre-Columbian times to the present. This book covers some familiar ground: the native cultures before the Spanish contact in the seventeenth century; the Spanish and Mexican struggles to survive in the harsh desert surrounded by Apaches; and the cowboys, developers, and ranchers of the nineteenth century. The chapters dealing with the state’s history in the twentieth century present information new to most readers, yet organized around some familiar themes: the development of water projects and agricultural lands, the overriding importance of the federal government in Arizona’s economy, the explosion of population and industry in the postwar era.
Refreshingly, Sheridan makes some hitherto invisible actors more prominent in the drama. Stories about Mexicans, Native Americans, and women are scattered throughout the text. And he is not celebratory about white Arizona’s treatment of these groups. He characterizes Arizona’s political culture as “a curious mixture of Eastern colonialism, Western individualism, and Southern Jim Crowism” (p. 263). We learn of the racism and treachery experienced by the Apaches, Pimas, and Navajos and of the slavelike labor conditions endured by Mexican immigrants. Sheridan, furthermore, does not overurbanize the twentieth century, and he gives appropriate notice to controversies surrounding rural residents, the Navajos, ranchers, and loggers.
This book is a prime example of a well-written regional history that does not marginalize the particular and local. Arizona’s present residents, most of whom are recent immigrants to the state, would do well to read this book to find out how they are part of a larger epic that links them to cosmic forces of nature.
