Stroll through Larimer Square in Denver or through Pioneer Square in Seattle and you feel that you're stepping into history while browsing the expensive boutiques and tourist shops. But are you? In this intriguing study of some of America's favorite places, Judy Morley takes a fresh look at adaptive reuse efforts in cities of the former frontier. Focusing on urban preservation resulting from the competing interests of architectural preservationists, city planners, chambers of commerce, and boosters, she shows how developers have often taken artistic license to refashion the western past into shopping centers and tourist traps-in ways that privilege an imagined "heritage" over a more complex history. Examining Old Town Albuquerque, Larimer Square and LoDo in Denver, and Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market in Seattle, Morley describes the creation and marketing of western heritage under the guise of historic preservation. She draws on extensive interviews, city council proceedings, and historic plats and photographs to construct a detailed picture of how these districts originally looked and were used, how they were renovated, and to what ends they were marketed. This is the first book to systematically address issues of historic preservation and western urban growth, examining the interplay of identity, preservation, and tourism. It identifies the economic, political, and social issues that transformed each historic district into a place that resonated with the popular imagination. Along the way, Morley exposes the ironies that have attracted criticism to historic districts, such as Old Town Albuquerque's celebration of Hispanic heritage-even though Hispanic residents were displaced during the renovation-or Larimer Square's hiding of its actual skid-row past beneath a veneer of more tourist-friendly history. But while critics charge that historic preservation often celebrates a sanitized past, Morley suggests that these locales offer both residents and visitors a window on a shared romantic history and a sense of belonging, serving as vital locations for community festivals, holiday events, and even public gatherings in times of tragedy. Historic Preservation and the Imagined West argues that, although these districts did not so much preserve history as create mythic identities for their cities, they have in their way reconciled the past with the needs of the future.

When prospector "Ed" Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he'd find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the West—a strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the town's long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstone—and turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls "equal parts Deadwood and Disney"? A meditation on the marketing of "authenticity," Imagining Tombstone considers this "most authentic western town in America" as the intersection of history and mythmaking, entertainment and education, the wish to preserve, the will to succeed, and the need to survive. McCormack revisits the facts behind the feud that culminated in the Earp brothers' and Doc Holliday's long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurys—a walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstone's tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the town's streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the town's tenacity depends on far more than a "usable past." If Tombstone is "The Town Too Tough to Die," it is also, as this edifying and entertaining book makes clear, the place where authentic history and its counterpart in popular culture reveal their lasting and lucrative hold on the public imagination.

"Examines the efforts of Independence, Missouri, to preserve and balance competing elements of the city's history: as the hometown of President Harry S. Truman; as the site where Joseph Smith established the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; and as the historic gathering place for western emigration"--Provided by publisher.

A framework for stabilizing and strengthening inner-city neighborhoods through the public interpretation of historic landscapes.

The author traces the evolution of early frontier towns at the beginning of Western expansion to the thriving urban centers they have become today.

Historic sites celebrate defining moments in history, memorialize important events and people, and contribute to the character of the locations where they are situated. Heritage designation, both globally and nationally, is an inherently contested issue. As detailed in this volume, concerns of politics and identity, criteria for designation, impacts on communities and sites, and challenges to management planning are central to any understanding of the process by which heritage sites are created, developed, and maintained. The idea for this volume originated at a symposium hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Contributors address such topics as the need to revamp criteria for designation, the effect historic site recognition has on local communities, the challenges encountered in maintaining a site, and issues linked to specific political climates or actions and group identity. The contributors constitute an international cast of leading scholars, employees, and policy-makers, all of whom have had extensive experience with World Heritage and National Register site stewardship. The work will be an invaluable reference for historians, architects, and those committed to the preservation of national monuments.

The Encyclopedia of Politics in the American West is an A to Z reference work on the political development of one of America’s most politically distinct, not to mention its fastest growing, region. This work will cover not only the significant events and actors of Western politics, but also deal with key institutional, historical, environmental, and sociopolitical themes and concepts that are important to more fully understanding the politics of the West over the last century.

For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.

The American West, from the beginning of Euro-American settlement, has been shaped by diverse ideas about how to utilize physical space and natural environments to create cohesive, sometimes exclusive community identities. When westerners developed their towns, they constructed spaces and cultural identities that reflected alternative understandings of modern urbanity. The essays in City Dreams, Country Schemes utilize an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways that westerners conceptualized, built, and inhabited urban, suburban, and exurban spaces in the twentieth century. The contributors examine such topics as the attractions of open space and rural gentrification in shaping urban development; the role of tourism in developing national parks, historical sites, and California's Napa Valley; and the roles of public art, gender, and ethnicity in shaping urban centers. City Dreams, Country Schemes reveals the values and expectations that have shaped the West and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

Demonstrating how the growth of a midsized city can illuminate urban development issues across an entire region, this exemplary history of Corpus Christi explores how competing regional and cosmopolitan influences have shaped this thriving port and leisur