The US50 - A guide to the state of Arizona

Arizona State

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May 17, 2008

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Arizona Historic Figures

Cochise
1812-74: Chiricahua Apache chief; born in present-day Arizona or New Mexico. Initially friendly toward whites, he embarked on a campaign against them in 1861 after he had been imprisoned on the false charge of having kidnapped a white child. With the murder of his father-in-law, Mangas Coloradas, in 1863, he became the main war chief of the Apaches. For many years he engaged in a series of violent actions against white settlers and the U.S. Army, but he was gradually isolated in a smaller and smaller mountainous region. After winning assurances from the U.S. government that he and his band could remain in the Chiricahua Mountains, he surrendered in 1872.
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Sandra Day O'Connor
1930 - Present: Supreme Court justice; born in El Paso, Texas. After taking her law degree from Stanford (1952), she had a private practice in Arizona; serving in the Arizona Senate (1969-74), she was the first woman in America to be elected majority leader of a state senate (1972-74). She was elected to a county superior court (1974--79) and was then appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals (1979-81). When President Ronald Reagan selected her, she became the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court (1981). Generally conservative in her legal views, she occasionally took independent positions and for long held the "swing vote" on the issue of abortion.
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Wyatt Earp
1848-1929: (Berry Stapp) Gambler, gunfighter, and lawman, born in Monmouth, IL. He drifted through the West working at a variety of jobs from confidence trickster to assistant marshal. During his stay in Tombstone, AZ, he befriended Doc Holliday, who joined with the Earp brothers against the Clanton gang in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral (1881). Earp collaborated in the writing of his biography Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal (1931), published after his death. The book portrayed him as a heroic frontiersman of the Wild West.
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Cesar Chavez
1927-93: Labor leader; born in Yuma, Ariz. A migrant farmworker in his youth, he attended 65 elementary schools and never graduated from high school, he became a community and labor organizer of agricultural workers in the 1950s. In 1962 he started the National Farm Workers Association, based in California and the Southwest among the mainly Chicano (Mexican-Americans) and Filipino farmworkers; in 1966 this union would be chartered by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations as the United Farm Workers of America; he remained its president until his death.
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Barry Goldwater
1909-Present: U.S. senator; born in Phoenix, Ariz. Grandson of an immigrant peddler in the Western mining camps, he inherited a prosperous department store business of which he became president in 1937. An active sportsman, he was one of the first white men to navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. During World War II, he was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force (1941-45). A conservative Republican, he served in the U.S. Senate (Ariz., 1953-65, 1969-87). He was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He ran for the presidency (1964) but was defeated in a landslide by Lyndon B. Johnson
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