southwest

Featuring Ann Nolan Clark’s poetic prose and softly-colored illustrations by renowned Chiricahua artist Allan Houser in The Desert People, this book teaches us about the yearly cycle of Tohono O’odom traditional life and culture through the experiences of a young boy being taught by his father. Clark was an award-winning writer and educator whose books about American Indian life, culture, and language helped educate a generation of American Indian students during the New Deal years.

“It just seemed like a natural and harmless thing to do at the time” states author Bob Jones regarding the formation of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society in 1946. The ‘rockhounds’ who formed the group could not have anticipated that their organization would go on to create the world’s largest and most renowned gem and mineral show, frequented by scientists and scholars, dealers and vendors, artists and jewelers, and students and families alike.

Harvey Harlow Nininger is considered to be the father of meteoritics. He worked tirelessly to convince the scientific community that meteorites were far more common on Earth than previously thought and a valuable source of information about the solar system and the Earth’s geologic past.

This volume on Western style encompasses everything from humble denim jeans to the fanciest rhinestone-covered cowboy costumes. Brimming with photos, it presents a history of the American West spanning its early days to the present, told through clothing. You’ll find a buckskin hunting shirt from the 1820s, Angora chaps worn by a Colorado cowboy in the 1920s, and a colorful gauze fiesta dress from the 1950s made by Thunderbird Fashions of Prescott, AZ.

This book showcases evocative pictures of Southwestern churches taken by Douglas Kent Hall, a well-known documentary photographer. Originally from New York, Hall moved to the small village of Alcalde in northern New Mexico. He spent time travelling throughout the Southwest and along the Mexico-U.S. border in the 1980s gathering material for two photographic books.

In October 1881, Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers had a shoot-out with the Clanton and McLaury brothers on a street in Tombstone, Arizona. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral has become the stuff of legends and the subject of numerous books and movies. This detailed history provides context and information not only about the gunfight itself but also about the booming town of Tombstone and its place in the overall history of the violent Western frontier. It includes photographs of the participants as well as of the site where it took place.

“Writers of mystery stories often have to cast about for the key elements of an intriguing story […] I did not go looking for these critical ingredients of the story of the Tucson Meteorite. They came to me.” states Richard R. Willey in his forward to this short but thorough book. This book explores every aspect of the Meteorites – from their original descent to Earth, their mineral composition, to their use as anvils by American Indians and frontiersmen alike, to their name as a specimen, and the history of how they came to be in the Smithsonian.

There has not been much scholarship published on the history of African Americans in the American West and this may be one of the reasons the average person may have misconceptions about that history. This is why titles such as Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos are such a welcome addition to research collections.

The African American soldiers who served in the Spanish-American War and the Indian Wars were known as the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Especially remarkable is that  both of these conflicts occurred during the latter half of the 19th century, meaning that some of Buffalo Soldiers had been enslaved just years prior. Yet in spite of this and other obstacles, they were known for serving with valor and honor. In addition, they were tasked with the controversial job of helping to "settle" western states, including Arizona.

There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research.

Zane Grey, the American author famous for his popular Western adventure novels, published this non-fiction work in 1919. In addition to being a dentist and writer, Grey was an avid fisherman. This title is full of zesty and manly fishing adventures of watching and wrestling with big game fish off the coast of southern California and is tastefully illustrated with photos taken by the author.

Max Ernst was one of the most prolific and original artists of the 20th century. After marrying American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona where they lived until 1953. It was in Sedona that Ernst completed his monumental masterpiece Capricorn. Originally constructed in cement from castings of milk bottles, automobile springs, and other cast offs, the free-standing sculpture was situated opposite the house Ernst built by hand on Brewer Road.

German artist Max Ernst was a pioneer of the Dada and Surrealist movement. After marrying American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona, where they lived until 1953. Initially remote and unpopulated, an artists’ colony soon took root amongst the monumental red rocks.

An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures.

Samuel Woodworth Cozzens (1834-1878) was a lawyer, and for a time United States district judge of Arizona. His published works include The Marvellous Country (Boston, 1876), The Young Trail-Hunters series, and Nobody's Husband (1878).  He travelled in Arizona during a relatively calm period of Apache activity, though he writes about several bloody episodes in the book. He met various prominent Arizonans such as the Penningtons on their way to Southern Arizona. and the legendary chief of the Chokonens, Cochise.

This 1906 volume features essays written by notable travelers who visited the West, including John Wesley Powell (who was the first director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and whom the Smithsonian's Anthropology Library is named after), artist Thomas Moran, geologist R.D. Salisbury, poet Harriet Monroe, and others. It is illustrated with many black and white photographs, showing the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon.

In 1890, Arizona Territory had its own Commissioner of Immigration, John A. Black, who wrote this piece to extol the virtues and resources of the territory.

In 1871, seventeen-year-old Fred Dellenbaugh, under the lead of Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero and the first director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, journeyed into the Grand Canyon and its subsidiary canyons and rivers with the intention of exploring, mapping, and recording descriptions of the uncharted territory. The men found themselves battling the great force of the Colorado River, with its fatal, quick rapids and mighty waterfalls. This is Dellenbaugh’s personal story, written thirty years after the great adventure.

Richard J. Hinton (1830-1901), an Englishman, crossed the Atlantic in 1851 and took up residence in New York City. While there he learned the printer's trade and soon became a newspaper reporter. As a reporter he opposed the Fugitive Slave Law, became an anti-slavery advocate, and assisted in the organization of the Republican Party, which came into being in large part to oppose the expansion of slavery as embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

“For more than thirty years the author has been gathering information from old timers, Indians, Mexicans, cowboys, sheep-herders, historians, any and everybody who had a story to tell as to the origin and meaning of Arizona names” begins Will Croft Barnes' most well-known work, Arizona Place Names – the product of a lifetime of travel throughout Arizona as a result of his military, political, geographical, and ecological services to the U.S.

Ansel Adams curated a selection of more than 100 images of his photographs of the Southwest, taken between 1928 and 1975. In 1937, Adams wrote to his friend Alfred Stieglitz of his time in the Southwest: "it is all very beautiful and magical here--a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you." In this book, Adams' iconic black and white photographs encompass both expansive, awe-inspiring landscapes and quiet studies of nature and people. 

This colorful catalog for an exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1980 presents photography, painting, and sculpture created by artists who traveled through Arizona and were inspired by the state. The 93 artists included in the exhibition and this catalog span nearly 150 years, and include Helen Frankenthaler, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, and Carleton Watkins. 

This book captures the colorful spirit of the American West in its history and quirks. Included are songs and stories, charts of brands used to mark cattle, and sketches of the boom and bust of the Old West. In one chapter, the author informs us that the Westerner left his names casually and naturally on the land and on each other, without ostentation. This led to names like Jerked Beef Butte or Rattlesnake Basin in Arizona, or nicknames for fellow cowboys like Crooked-Nose Pete and Three-Fingered Smith. 

This 80 paged collector's edition stamp album collector's pays homage to many classic American comics, including but not limited to Dick Tracy, Popeye, Li'l Abner, Flash Gordon, and Krazy Kat.

This work, which includes information about Arizona’s State Amphibian (Hyla eximia, the Arizona treefrog or Mountain treefrog), is part of the important Smithsonian series, Bulletin of the United States National Museum. The Libraries holds a comprehensive collection of Smithsonian publications stretching back to the first publication of the Institution in 1848.