Selling the Meaning of Place: Entrepreneurship, Tourism, and Community Transformation in the Twentieth-Century American West

Abstract

Tourism, as much as any other industry, has defined the high and low points in the development of the twentieth-century West.1 Despite its importance and its inclusion within an earlier generation's matrix of scholarly inquiry, the subject has remained largely unexplored even as its significance to the western economy has increased. Over the past century the West has experienced a proliferation in the varieties of tourism, from the marketing of the region's scenery and mythic past to the post-World War II development of recreation and entertainment. Tourism has also emerged as a hoped for panacea to which people turn when they seek to revive areas in economic decline. Because tourism is a malleable industry designed to anticipate and cultivate trends in American society, its growth since 1900 has been influenced by changing cultural iconography, increased wealth and broader distribution of income, and