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Notes Keyword 1. John R. Searle offers a classic formulation of this problem in “Proper Names.” Proper names are descriptive pointers, or “pegs on which to hang descriptions” (172), they do not constitute the identities of the objects to which they refer. John R. Searle, “Proper Names,” Mind 67, no. 266 (1958): 166–73. 2. Piero G. Delprete, “Revision and Typification of Brazilian Augusta (Rubiacae, Rondeletieae), with Ecological Observations on the Riverine Vegetation of the Cerrado and Atlantic Forests,” Brittonia 49, no. 4 (1997): 487. 3. Ibid., 488. 4. Ibid., 487. 5. Augusta, Georgia, from whence Scott Nixon hailed, likewise acquired its appellation in honor of a royal personage: Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of Wales. Augusta, Georgia, was established and named in 1735 by James Oglethorpe, who had tasked Noble Jones with establishing a settlement at the head of a navigable part of the Savannah River. Introduction 1. Initially, we understood Scott Nixon to be a traveling insurance salesman. But on a visit to Augusta, Georgia, in May 2013, Cobbs Nixon, Nixon’s son, 118 Notes to Pages xviii–xxi corrected us: Scott Nixon was an independent insurance agent. He presented us with examples of stationary, cards, blotters, and other materials, all bearing the imprint “Scott Nixon—Independent Insurance Agent.” Cobbs Nixon explained that his father did travel extensively for work (e.g., conventions, professional meetings, etc.). And he made it a point to travel through Augustas when he was on the road—always with one or more cameras in tow. Then Cobbs Nixon declared that if his father “sold anything, it was Augusta!” Extremely proud of his hometown, Nixon promoted it wherever he went. 2. Shooting on 16 mm and Super 8, Nixon amassed thousands of feet (approximately 26,400 feet of 16 mm and 10,000 feet of Super 8) of film documenting five decades of travel across the United States. Originally donated to the Augusta Museum and the Augusta chapter of the National Railway Historical Society (both of which are in the state of Georgia in the United States), these home movies were gifted to the University of South Carolina (USC East) in 2000 and currently reside in the Moving Image Research Collections there. I thank Greg Wilsbacher, curator for the Fox Movietone News Collection at the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC), who took the time (academic year 2007–2008) to show me Nixon’s The Augustas one frame at a time via magnifying loupe. My continued thanks to Moving Image Research Collections, whose initial interim director, Mark Garrett Cooper, and current interim director, Heather Heckman, have supported my ongoing use of the film. I also thank Dan Streible (Orphans Film Symposium/NYU, 2010), Andrew Lampert (Orphans Redux/Anthology Film Archive, NY, 2011), UCLA Film and Television Archives (Celebrating Orphan Films, 2011), and Joan Hawkins (University of Indiana and IU Cinema/Bloomington, 2011) for ensuring The Augustas’ sustained visibility. Finally, I thank Dan Streible and Simon Tarr (UVA) who advocated for The Augustas to be included in the U.S. National Film Registry (2012). The Augustas was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress on 18 December 2012. 3. The problem did not acquire its official name until 1949—the year of the Pulitzer Prize–winning and Tony Award–winning play Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)—when it became a listed RAND Corporation prizewinning challenge. However, William J. Cook indicates that Harvard mathematician Hassler Whitney posed the basic problem in 1934. According to Cook, in a seminar talk delivered at Princeton, Whitney referred to the “48-states problem.” In papers predating this public pronouncement, he had apparently described the basic principle in geographical terms: nodes (i.e., points) became countries, the [44.204.65.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:03 GMT) 119 Notes to Pages xxi–xxii path connecting them was “travel,” and a complete circuit through a designated series of sites was a “trip.” Of course, as Cook notes, this kind of problem has confronted people for centuries. And mathematical antecedents were introduced in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—most notably Eulerian paths or cycles (Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler) and Hamiltonian circuits (Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton). Likewise, later mathematicians, for example, Karl Menger of Vienna who worked on what he called the “messenger problem,” had begun pursuing TSP-related problems in other parts of the world. The TSP still stands among the “impossible” problems in computational mathematics. See William J. Cook, In Pursuit of...