The lively role of the newspaper in “telling history’s story” comes across in An Arizona Chronology, Volume Two, the continued selection by the late veteran journalist, Douglas D. Martin, of reported highlights in Arizona’s first two and a half decades as a state.

Here were the years in which Arizona’s “bad men” virtually dropped out of sight, and the trigger-blast was displaced by the gavel-thumping sound of law and order as a Territory grew up and became a state. The problem of the Apache was no more, and the problem of water began to loom large. Depression and prohibition were the counter-themes. And Arizona’s three C's—Copper, Cattle, and Cotton—were about to strike for their place in the national limelight.

It was a time of conversion. The vital currents of frontier energy were turned into the channels of modern agriculture, finance, and urban growth. As this volume’s editor, Patricia Paylore, points out, the transformation reaffirms Douglas Martin’s view of Arizona history as the “persistence of the pioneer spirit of the nineteenth century” in terms of “the strength and optimism of a young people determined to take its place in the Union.”

An Arizona Chronology: The Territorial Years contains the first sheaves of a newspaperman's gleaning of history from the crisp, yellowing abundance of old newspapers and other Arizona archives.

Who better to choose news items giving a key to the times than Douglas D. Martin, who first set newspaper type when he was 15, filled news and magazine columns and book pages galore, and today at 75 is still writing for print? He knows newspapers from the composing room to the editor's desk—Detroit Free Press—not excepting reportorial beats, having received the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his own.

With six teachers, no books, and thirty-two students, Old Main opened its doors to the first pupils of the University of Arizona in 1891. A rugged beacon among the cacti, the campus emerged from a forty-acre donation from two gamblers and a saloonkeeper. The Lamp in the Desert is Douglas D. Martin’s history of the first seventy-five years of the University of Arizona. From early football wins by Coach McKale to the work of celebrated scholars, this is a story of the places and the people whose names are still visible reminders of the early innovators that helped to build a world-class institution.