David Rookhuyzen
261 episodes listed below
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A podcast tracing the history, events, people and places that made the Grand Canyon State.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · June 2026
AZ uses Arizona history as a sharp lens on war, science, Native communities, military posts, and public memory.
AZ: The History of Arizona belongs on the History shelf as state history with range. The host moves from Lowell Observatory and Pluto to wartime Arizona, Fort Huachuca, Papago Park, and the Navajo code talkers, usually starting with one incident or figure before opening into the…
For the listener who likes Arizona history with receipts, detours, and one dry raised eyebrow.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A small wartime donation opens into a broader look at service, sacrifice, and overlooked labor.
A wartime account built from small acts of sacrifice and the larger machinery that tried to name them. It starts with a Navajo man walking miles to a reservation trading post and donating 30 cents, then widens to Native contributions, women's auxiliaries, and the way Arizona was…
A border-war history that keeps the cavalry, the politics, and the racism in frame.
This episode tracks the 10th Cavalry through the fighting in Mexico and the fallout that made Charles Young a liability to officers who could not accept a Black superior.
A careful look at bravery, silence, and the long shadow they leave behind.
The episode puts the Code Talkers' service in the same frame as the silence that followed, then follows Samuel Holliday into a late visit to Japan where memory, grief, and respect sit close together.
A careful setup for the code talker story, with enough historical context to make the groundwork matter.
Episode 247 works as a measured setup for the Navajo Code Talkers story. It explains why Navajo made sense for code work: the Germans had overlooked it after World War I, it was not written down, it had resisted English borrowings, and only about 30 non-Navajo were thought to…
A battleship history that stays grounded in names, towns, and the people left behind.
Episode 234 follows the USS Arizona from its March 16, 1914 keel laying and June 19, 1915 launch through commissioning, then keeps circling back to the local names attached to its wartime losses.
A tense, specific look at code talkers, wartime secrecy, and the risk of being misread.
The episode follows the Navajo code talkers through the less polished side of war: delayed letters from home, heavy censorship, and the extra burden families carried when English had to be written down by someone else.
A clear, ground-level look at the code talkers as Marines, not symbols.
AZ: The History of Arizona keeps the Navajo Code Talkers grounded as Marines doing hard wartime work, not as stand-ins for a larger legend. David Rickhausen opens with With the Old Breed, then follows the code talkers through Peleliu, Okinawa, Guadalcanal, and the wider Pacific,…
Arizona border troop cuts become a local story about fear, pride, and the slow end of an era.
Arizona's borderlands in the early 1920s are less a backdrop than the point of the story. The episode tracks Army retrenchment as camps are pulled back from border posts, and it gives the Buffalo Soldiers the weight they deserve in a history shaped by postwar cutbacks.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
David Rickhausen returns to the Papago Park escape.
David Rickhausen starts with a patch of southern Arizona that looks ordinary now.
Episode 240 examines the Japanese American experience in Arizona during WWII, opening with Susie Sato's family fleeing California before forced internment.
The USS Arizona starts as steel on a shipyard floor.
Episode follows Charles Young and the 10th Cavalry through the border fighting tied to the Mexican punitive expedition.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 242, "Shikata ga nai," follows Japanese American incarceration in Poston and Gila River, including how the camps were run by block councils and how the War Relocation Authority barred Issei from serving in June 1942.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 226, “Camp Naco,” follows the 10th Cavalry to Fort Huachuca and the border during the Mexican Revolution, where soldiers were sent to places like Nogales, Yuma, and Camp Naco in 1914.
AZ: The History of Arizona episode 228 follows the 10th Cavalry and 25th Infantry at Fort Huachuca after the Punitive Expedition, with details from David Wark’s account of drills, NCO classes, band concerts, baseball games, and the daily routines that filled garrison life.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 249, "The Code Talkers, Part III: Do You Have a Navajo," follows Chester Nez and other Navajo Code Talkers from New Caledonia to Guadalcanal, using details like the 80-pound TBX radio and the initial October 1942 deployment.
World War II turned Arizona into a grid of training grounds, and the episode uses Dean Smith’s line that installations sprouted “like dandelions on a green lawn” to frame that expansion.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast episode 230, "Ragtown," connects Hoover Dam’s later scale to the harsh logistics of building it in Black Canyon.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 236, "The Thanksgiving Day Riot," ties Fort Huachuca, Papago Park, and Phoenix together through black soldiers' wartime experience in Arizona.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 224, “Camp Huachuca,” begins with a current-events detour about the White Sage and Dragon Bravo fires, the closure of the North Rim, and the destruction of up to 80 structures at the Grand Canyon Lodge.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 244, The Homefront, opens with a February 1945 Phoenix story about Marine sergeant Lundy, the millionth military visitor to the Community Servicemen's Center, and a planned date with the Citrus Queen.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 223, “Pluto,” traces how Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff turned a long, systematic search for Planet X into Clyde Tombaugh’s 1930 discovery.
Ten men kept at it.
Fort Huachuca becomes the thread tying together Geronimo, a May 3, 1887 earthquake, the Cananea riot scare, and the Buffalo Soldiers in AZ: The History of Arizona Episode 225, “The Cantonese Paymaster.” David Rickhausen also names two unusual Fort Huachuca connections: Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia, father of Fiorello LaGuardia, and Sam Key, a Chinese immigrant restaurateur who became known as the Cantonese Paymaster.
This episode of AZ: The History of Arizona follows the Hoover Dam’s dedication, the naming disputes around Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, and Lake Havasu, and then turns to Arizona’s clash with California over the Parker Dam.
David Ruckhausen traces how Executive Order 9006 and Military Area 1 pushed Japanese Americans out of Phoenix, Glendale, Tempe, and Mesa, with one family in Phoenix forced out because the army said they were a quarter mile too close to the airport.
AZ: The History of Arizona traces how World War II reshaped Phoenix, Tucson, and the state between 1939 and December 7, 1941, using population figures like Phoenix’s 65,500 residents and the rise of airfields such as Luke Field, Williamsfield, Falcon Field, and Davis-Montham.
Felix Sparks reaches Dachau.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 229 traces the decline of the 10th Cavalry and 25th Infantry at Fort Huachuca after the Mexican Revolution and World War I.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast, Episode 250, focuses on Navajo Code Talkers and the wartime paranoia that shaped their service in the Pacific.
This episode explores the origins of the Navajo Code Talkers in World War II, starting with earlier uses of Amerindian languages in WWI.
Host David Rickhausen narrates the construction of Hoover Dam through the lens of human tragedy, opening with the connected deaths of father-son Tierneys (1921, 1935) on the same December date.
Mid-1943 opens with the Army turning Civilian Conservation Corps buildings east of Phoenix, under Papago Buttes, into Service Command Unit 1982: a 160-acre POW camp with double barbed wire, guard towers, a canal, and plain white barracks.
Thirty cents start the story.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast episode 251, “The Code Talkers, Part V: I Was a Radioman,” widens the story beyond the Navajo by naming 21 tribes, more than 400 Navajo Code Talkers, and a 2008 Recognition Act signed by George W.
AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 243, “Leaving the Camps,” focuses on Mitsuye Endo, the Japanese American woman whose case helped force the release of people from Arizona’s wartime camps.
This episode explores the historical significance of local city council meetings, focusing on how Phoenix residents' discontent with their council in the late 1940s shaped the city's modern development and political landscape.
This episode traces the origins of Jim Crow laws from minstrel shows to segregation in Arizona.
The host apologizes for a delayed episode due to illness from a daycare bug, promising to return next week.
The episode discusses the ongoing search for Planet 9, a hypothesized planet in the outer solar system, and recent evidence from infrared surveys.
This episode explores historical misconceptions in astronomy, from geocentrism to the ether, leading into a discussion of a prominent popular astronomer.
This episode explores the 1877 discovery of lines on Mars by Italian astronomer Schiaparelli and the mistranslation that sparked a public sensation about artificial canals.
The host apologizes for a late episode and then discusses the opening of the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway in Arizona.
This episode discusses the current demographics of Phoenix, Arizona, and sets up the city's historical transformation from a small settlement to a major metropolis.
A first-hand account of the 1917 labor strike at the Old Dominion Mine in Globe, Arizona, from the perspective of a worker who stayed on the job.
This episode explores the political career of George W.P.