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.
