Recognized by its splashy color photographs displaying Arizona's scenic wonders, Arizona Highways is the best known and most widely circulated state-owned magazine. Founded in 1925 with a starting circulation of 1,000 issues, Arizona Highways evolved from a drab engineering pamphlet laced with ugly, black-and-white construction advertisements to a full-color, advertisement-free, photographic essay promoting Arizona. Today, with subscribers in all fifty states and 120 foreign countries, it is the state's visual ambassador and an international proselytizer of the romanticized Southwest.

Arizona Highways was one of twenty-three state-published magazines that began with the expressed purpose of promoting the construction of new and better roads. Arizona, like many Western states, saw tourism as an important economic resource, but did not have the roads necessary to take advantage of America's dependable new automobiles and increased leisure time. This good-roads movement, which swept the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrested...