Imagining "the Town too Tough to Die": Tourism, Preservation, and History in Tombstone, Arizona

This dissertation looks at the ways popular culture, preservation, and economic exigencies continually circulate and interact in Tombstone, Arizona the ways tourists make meaning from the site the importance of the concepts of history and authenticity and the resonance of the Earp Myth and the Mythic West worldwide. Tombstone's place within that myth cannot be understated, as it has come to signify for many the ideas wrapped up in the myth as a whole. On a more basic level, Tombstone fits within wider trends in historic preservation and heritage sites that are central to an analysis of the power and consumption of narratives of the past, the importance and strength of tourist dollars, the centrality of popular culture to our understandings of history, and the link between the manipulation of history and place.