Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die

Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (CultureAmerica)

When prospector â€œEdâ€ Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all heâ€™d find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the Westâ€”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 townâ€™s long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstoneâ€”and turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls â€œequal parts Deadwood and Disneyâ€?

A meditation on the marketing of â€œauthenticity,â€ Imagining Tombstone considers this â€œmost authentic western town in Americaâ€ 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 brothersâ€™ and Doc Hollidayâ€™s long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurysâ€”a walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstoneâ€™s tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the townâ€™s streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the townâ€™s tenacity depends on far more than a â€œusable past.â€ If Tombstone is â€œThe Town Too Tough to Die,â€ 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.
Country USA
Manufacturer University Press of Kansas
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-04-30
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	University Press of Kansas
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-04-30
Format	Kindle eBook

Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (CultureAmerica)

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