Event Information

Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory

Live Presentation via Zoom
Virtual Screening Room
Wednesday, Mar 4, 2026 12:00 PM
Arizona / Mountain Standard Time
Join the Arizona Historical Society and Dr. Eduardo Pagán for Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory, an installment of the Arizona Histories, American Stories series, celebrating Arizona’s role in 250 years of American history.

Dr. Pagán will talk about his newest book, Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory, available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Telling Georgie’s story in Tumbleweed Underworld, Pagán exposes a dark underside of the turn-of-the-century American West, where attorneys, soldiers, doctors, miners, well-off women, and Chinese immigrants were caught up in the country’s first opioid epidemic.

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Dr. Eduardo Obregón Pagán is the Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History and Associate Dean of Barrett The Honors College at Arizona State University. He is also an adjunct curator of history at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum. He has published in diverse scholarly journals, and is the author of Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Valley of the Guns: The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). He is also an active as a public historian, publishing books on the history of Phoenix with a trade press, and was a co-host of History Detectives on PBS.