Travel the World Café at Elizabethtown Public Library

Elizabethtown Coffee Company is the heart of the World Café program at Elizabethtown Public Library and helps to advance our mission. The vision of the World Café is to increase awareness of authors, cultures and realities from around the globe. We want everyone to be able to discover new places and different ideas that expand our thinking and our minds.

Each month the Library selects a different location. Sometimes its a region within the United States. It might be a coffee or tea growing country and it may even be a body of water that houses sea creatures and mythical beings. You can sign up to participate in this year-long program and complete your World Café passport for a year of exploration and a chance to win fun prizes.

July highlights New Mexico!

Location & Geography

Pre-History to Statehood

Likely evidence for the earliest humans in North America is preserved by fossilized footprints at the White Sands National Park. Before the discovery of the footprints and a study published in 2023 in Science, it was generally believed that humans made their way to North America after the last Ice Age, roughly up to 16,000 years ago. However, after their discovery in the early 21st century, scientists have used multiple methods in dating the footprints and have concluded they are around 21,000 to 23,000 years old. Other footprints found in the area include Columbian mammoths, Harlan’s ground sloths, dire wolves, American lions, and ancient camels. You can learn more about the fossilized footprints and the White Sands at the National Park Service’s website.

Zooming forward in time, New Mexico is still home to many of the native peoples who lived in the area at the arrival of the Spanish. There are 23 independent tribal governments located in New Mexico. One tribe of note is the Zuni Pueblo, who, like other Pueblos, are descended from the Ancient Pueblos who lived in the region for thousands of years. The Zuni have been in the same location for over 1,000 years and were the first to encounter the Spanish in 1540. You can learn more about the different Tribes of New Mexico and find further links to their websites here.

The oldest capital city in the modern United States is not along the Atlantic coast, but is Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico. This is also the oldest European community west of the Mississippi River. Settled in 1610, Santa Fe became a regional capital of the Spanish Empire. While there were historically native settlements in the area of Santa Fe before this time, it is believed that they were abandoned at the time of European settlement in the early 17th century.

A couple centuries after Santa Fe was settled, Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. It was then just over two decades later that the Mexican American War led to the United States acquiring New Mexico, along with other present-day states (in whole or in part): Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. It was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, that ended the war and led to the acquisition of land for the United States.

While American settlers had already been moving into New Mexico before the land was acquired from Mexico, the population did not dramatically increase until the 1880s. This is partially due to the native resistance of colonial expansion. The Apache and Navajo resisted the most, and Geronimo surrendered in 1886. The subjugation of the natives along with the Santa Fe Railroad led to a ranching boom and increased population. Later, in 1912, New Mexico became the 47th state.

State Bird Craft