Insider American

Arizona has more ghost towns per square mile than almost any state in the American West. The combination of mineral wealth, remote terrain, boom-bust mining economics, and a late-19th-century settlement rush created hundreds of communities that flourished briefly and then emptied with almost equal speed when the ore ran out, the railroad bypassed them, or the water supply failed. What...

Tombstone, Arizona has a marketing problem that is also, in a backwards way, its greatest asset. Every visitor arrives knowing at least one thing: the gunfight at the OK Corral, October 26, 1881, 30 seconds of violence that produced three dead cowboys and the most documented gunfight in American frontier history. That singular event, endlessly retold in film, television, and...

Southern Arizona gets flattened by its own famous landmarks. The Grand Canyon is five hours north. Sedona gets its own category. Tucson is the major city. Tombstone earns its famous name. Everything in between, the wine country, the sky island mountain ranges, the birding preserves, the border towns with extraordinary history, the art colonies older than Scottsdale's gallery district,...

Jerome, Arizona is having an identity crisis, in the best possible way. It is simultaneously a ghost town (officially designated one of the largest in America), a thriving arts destination, a wine trail hub, a haunted history landmark, and a jaw-dropping piece of landscape architecture where 19th-century buildings cling to a steep mountainside above one of the most beautiful...

America has a small-town problem. Not the problem people usually talk about, economic decline, population loss, lack of opportunity. The other problem: the best small towns in the country are so systematically overlooked by mainstream travel coverage that millions of people drive past them every year on the way to the same crowded destinations. This guide exists to fix that. What...