Virtual 2021 Summer History Highlight

The Old Trails Museum will present our 2021 Summer History Highlight online on Saturday, July 24, at 2 pm. Sativa Peterson, News Content Program Manager for the State of Arizona Research Library, will lead attendees through a free, interactive workshop called Revealing History – A Look at Community Through Arizona’s Historical Newspapers. Click here to register for this virtual program.

Using headlines, editorials, political cartoons, and photojournalism, Peterson will introduce audiences to Arizona’s historical newspapers; to the publishers, editors, and journalists who helped establish news writing in the early days of Arizona statehood; and to some of the defining moments in state history that they covered. Attendees will hear how they reported on women’s suffrage efforts in Arizona; which newspapers were published along the US/Mexico border during Prohibition; and about early African American community newspapers and the longest-running Spanish-language newspapers in the state.

Peterson will also demonstrate how to do one’s own searching using the Arizona Memory Project and Chronicling America websites, so that attendees can continue to explore historical newspapers on their own. Using journalism as a lens for reflecting on the human experience, these rich and valuable resources can show how we governed ourselves, faced conflict, and celebrated triumphs. They allow us to see how people viewed an event when it happened and to trace changing views over time. In short, historical newspapers capture the everyday life of the people and places of Arizona.

A Winslow native and graduate of Winslow High School, Peterson went on to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, with a master’s degree in journalism and the Pratt Institute with a master’s in library and information science. She served as Project Director for the National Digital Newspaper Program grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed the Arizona State Library to continue digitizing historical newspaper collections.

The 2021 Summer History Highlight is made possible in part by an Arizona Humanities grant funding multiple Revealing History online workshops, and we are grateful to them for giving us the opportunity to offer this presentation in a safe and engaging way.

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History Minutes on KINO Radio

Many thanks to KINO Radio (1230 AM) for airing History Minutes with the Old Trails Museum, our series of pre-recorded spots highlighting artifacts from the OTM Collections and encouraging listeners to come to the museum to see them in person.

The spots were created by OTM Director Ann-Mary Lutzick, who thanks Maree McHugh for her producing talents and Lori Bentley Law for her help as well. The spots air every other week, starting March 17 and continuing through September 2021, at these days and times:

  • Wednesday at 7:30 am, 12:00 noon, and 2:30 pm
  • Thursday at 7:30 am, 10:30 am, and 2:30 pm
  • Friday at 7:30 am, 12:00 noon, and 2:30 pm

If a museum visit is not possible, we’re also posting an image and description of each artifact on the OTM Facebook page, and a short video of the same on the OTM YouTube Channel. Seen here is Winslow artist Joseph Cruz Rodriquez’s oil painting, Sunset Crossing on the Little Colorado River, depicting the arrival of the railroads to the Winslow area.

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Virtual 2021 Spring History Highlight

The Old Trails Museum will present our 2021 Spring History Highlight online through the Virtual AZ Speaks program from Arizona Humanities. On Saturday, April 24, at 2 pm, OTM will host Dr. Robin Pinto’s presentation of The New Deal and the Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona: Connections to Our Historic Landscapes.

Arizona Humanities has temporarily transitioned their popular speaker presentations online so that statewide audiences can still enjoy high-quality cultural programming in these challenging times. Register for the virtual program here.

In this engaging presentation, Dr. Pinto will explore the history of the New Deal and how Arizonans responded to its challenges. It is an inspirational story of how individuals worked to better themselves; a story of how communities took care of inhabitants and total strangers during drought and Depression; and a story of how we, as a state, improved the lives of all and left an important built legacy for generations to come.

That legacy is still written in our landscapes, buildings, and communities – including Winslow. Today, we use those historic sidewalks, schools, and post offices without knowing that they were built for us more than eighty years ago. We enjoy parks and forests that were restored for us long ago. We can celebrate those “bootstrap” labors and remind ourselves that we, too, can rise above adversity to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

Several years ago, also with funding from AZ Humanities, Dr. Pinto joined a group of historians to develop The New Deal in Arizona: Connections to Our Historic Landscape, a printed map that provides a brief history of the New Deal and describes more than fifty heritage tourism sites around Arizona with New Deal-era buildings, landscapes, and remnants. The University of Arizona Libraries have since created a New Deal in Arizona website with the map, site descriptions, photographs, and detailed directions to these historic projects, many of which are still in use today. As the website recommends, “Plan a New Deal journey today!”

Dr. Pinto, who has an MLA and PhD from the University of Arizona, studies the evolution of cultural landscapes in Arizona. She writes historical landscape assessments for the National Park Service; works with the BLM Heritage Technical Team to study landscape change at the Empire Ranch and Cienega Creek watershed; and volunteers for numerous non-profit preservation organizations. She recently completed a book with three other historians entitled Cowboys and Cowgirls around Ajo, Arizona.

OTM’s 2021 Spring History Highlight is made possible by Arizona Humanities, and we are grateful to them for giving us the opportunity to offer this program in a safe and engaging way.

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OTM Debuts Winslow History Film

In February 2021, the Old Trails Museum debuted A Brief History of Winslow, Arizona, a short film that illustrates the city’s major historical themes through historic and contemporary images along with filmed segments.

Developed by OTM Director Ann-Mary Lutzick and Winslow Historical Society Board Member Lori Bentley Law in 2020, the film provides a basic overview of Winslow’s history and gives viewers a framework to absorb even more information whenever they visit one of Winslow’s many historic sites and buildings.

OTM thanks Northland Pioneer College for giving us the incentive to create the film by asking the museum to contribute to their series of online personal-interest classes. Lutzick has given many slide-show talks on Winslow’s history, but creating a film posed a new and daunting challenge.

Luckily, Law – co-owner of the Motor Palace Mercantile and recent addition to the WHS Board – came to the rescue! Before moving to Winslow in 2018, she was an Emmy-award winning photojournalist for NBC-Los Angeles for twenty-three years. Law brought her expertise to the project, and A Brief History of Winslow, Arizona is vastly improved for it.

Now that the film has served its purpose for NPC, OTM offers it as a virtual complement to our physical exhibits. You can view the film on our Videos page, the OTM You Tube Channel, and the La Posada Website.

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