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Summer History Talks: Rationality, Brutality, Insanity: Visita General to the Sonoran Frontier

Live Presentation via Zoom
Virtual Screening Room
Friday, Jul 25, 2025 12:00 PM
Arizona / Mountain Standard Time
Join the Arizona Historical Society and Dr. Nick Myers for an installment of AHS Summer History Talks: Spanish Period in Arizona!

In 1765, as part of a royal inspection of the Kingdom of New Spain, Visitador General José de Gàlvez travelled to the far northern reaches of Spanish colonization in North America. Gálvez was charged with enacting fundamental reforms in the systems of defense and taxation across the Viceroyalty as a whole. This talk will relate the strange story of the royal visita to the northern frontier and uncover the roots of the regions peculiarity, wildly diverse population, and prevalence of political autonomy that characterized the western portion of today's U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Spanish Colonial Era.

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Nicholas Myers currently works as a historian with The National Trails Office, a division of the National Park Service, in Santa Fe, NM. In 2021, he earned a PhD from Cornell University where he studied the history of Latin America, the U.S. West, and the US-Mexico borderlands. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.