Arizona Place Names with Gregory McNamee

Place names are a fossil poetry, hiding meaning inside their forms. They afford a kind of folk history, too, a snapshot in time that enables us to read them and reconstruct how members of a culture in the past assigned names to the places they saw. The United States has more than 3.5 million place names, and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetic, humorous, and picturesque – a tradition to which Arizona has had more than its share of contributions. This history of Arizona place names, from Ali Shonak to Zephyr, draws on a lively anecdotal approach to discuss the little-known stories behind names on the land.