Recent news from UA Press. To read our review of the book, click here.

Angela Hutchinson Hammer: Arizona’s Pioneer Newspaperwoman, published by the University of Arizona Press, has been named one of four finalists in the ONEBOOKAZ 2012 competition. This annual competition, sponsored by the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records, encourages communities across the State of Arizona to read the same book at the same time and participate in discussions and programs centered around that book.

Published in 2005, Angela Hutchinson Hammer tells the story of a true daughter of the West — a larger than life figure who crusaded against the commonly held belief that women belonged at home darning socks, not running a newspaper. Her decades-long involvement in Arizona’s newspaper industry took her from typesetting and proofreading in Phoenix to establishing a chain of newspapers in towns across the state, including the Wickenburg Miner and the Casa Grande Bulletin.

The author, Hammer’s granddaughter Betty Hammer Joy, weaves together the lively story of her grandmother’s life drawing upon Angela’s prodigious writing and correspondence, newspaper archives, and the recollections of family members. The book recounts the stories Angela told of growing up in mining camps, teaching in territorial schools, courtship, marriage, and a twenty-eight-year career in publishing and printing.

“As a teacher,” Betty Hammer Joy writes in the Preface, “I discovered that many students seemed to think that Arizona’s pioneers were only lawmen, outlaws, ranchers, miners, or women who stayed home to have babies. How often I had wished for lively, readable stories of the accomplishments of our early women.”

In her lifetime, Angela Hammer raised three sons, ran for public office before women in the nation had the right to vote, served as Immigration Commissioner in Pinal County, homesteaded, and matured into an activist for water conservation. After Angela’s death in 1952 the newspaper industry paid tribute to this courageous woman by selecting her as the first woman to enter the Arizona Newspaper Hall of Fame. In 1983 she was honored posthumously with another award for women who contributed to Arizona’s progress—induction into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame.

For more information on Betty Hammer Joy’s Angela Hutchinson Hammer, visit here.