abstract: The history of the American Old West has frequently been romanticized and idealized. This dissertation study explored four Arizona towns that developed during the era of the American Old West: Tombstone, Jerome, Oatman, and Globe. The study broadly examined issues of remembering/forgetting and historical authenticity/myth. It specifically analyzed historic tourist destinations as visual phenomenon: seeking to understand how town histories were visually communicated to contemporary tourists and what role historically-grounded visual narratives played in the overall tourist experience. The study utilized a visual methodology to organize and structure qualitative data collection and analysis; it incorporated visual data from historic and contemporary photographs and textual data from observations and interviews. Through a careful exploration of each town's past and present, the research proposed a measure to assess how the strength of visual connections between past and present impacted tourist impressions of each town. The analysis suggested that, due to a general lack of historic knowledge, tourist impressions were more closely connected to contemporary experiences and prior expectations of the American Old West than to historically-grounded visual narratives. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2014
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:25866 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Contributors | McMullen, Melissa (Author), Margolis, Eric (Advisor), Martin, Judith (Committee member), Rowe, Jeremy (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher) |
| Source Sets | Arizona State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Dissertation |
| Format | 162 pages |
| Rights | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/, All Rights Reserved |
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