Download or read book Cowboy Presidents written by David A. Smith and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For an element so firmly fixed in American culture, the frontier myth is surprisingly flexible. How else to explain its having taken two such different guises in the twentieth century—the progressive, forward-looking politics of Rough Rider president Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative, old-fashioned character and Cold War politics of Ronald Reagan? This is the conundrum at the heart of Cowboy Presidents, which explores the deployment and consequent transformation of the frontier myth by four U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Behind the shape-shifting of this myth, historian David A. Smith finds major events in American and world history that have made various aspects of the “Old West” frontier more relevant, and more useful, for promoting radically different political ideologies and agendas. And these divergent adaptations of frontier symbolism have altered the frontier myth. Theodore Roosevelt, with his vigorous pursuit of an activist federal government, helped establish a version of the frontier myth that today would be considered liberal. But then, Smith shows, a series of events from the Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy Carter presidencies—including Vietnam, race riots, and stagflation—seemed to give the lie to the progressive frontier myth. In the wake of these crises, Smith’s analysis reveals, the entire structure and popular representation of frontier symbols and images in American politics shifted dramatically from left to right, and from liberal to conservative, with profound implications for the history of American thought and presidential politics. The now popular idea that “frontier American” leaders and politicians are naturally Republicans with conservative ideals flows directly from the Reagan era. Cowboy Presidents gives us a new, clarifying perspective on how Americans shape and understand their national identity and sense of purpose; at the same time, reflecting on the essential mutability of a quintessentially national myth, the book suggests that the next iteration of the frontier myth may well be on the horizon.
Download or read book Cecil Andrus written by Cecil D. Andrus and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrus, four-term governor of Idaho and former US Secretary of the Interior under President Carter, brings his irascible charm to the task of reflecting upon his life as a politician. He reminisces frankly and honestly, giving particular attention to his fight to preserve the environment in his home state and throughout the nation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Cowboy Conservatism written by Sean P. Cunningham and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2010-07-02 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1960s and 1970s, Texas was rocked by a series of political transitions. Despite its century-long heritage of solidly Democratic politics, the state became a Republican stronghold virtually overnight, and by 1980 it was known as "Reagan Country." Ultimately, Republicans dominated the Texas political landscape, holding all twenty-seven of its elected offices and carrying former governor George W. Bush to his second term as president with more than 61 percent of the Texas vote. Sean P. Cunningham examines the remarkable history of Republican Texas in Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right. Utilizing extensive research drawn from the archives of four presidential libraries, gubernatorial papers, local campaign offices, and oral histories, Cunningham presents a compelling narrative of the most notable regional genesis of modern conservatism. Spanning the decades from Kennedy's assassination to Reagan's presidency, Cunningham reveals a vivid portrait of modern conservatism in one of the nation's largest and most politically powerful states. The newest title in the New Directions in Southern History series, Cunningham's Cowboy Conservatism demonstrates Texas's distinctive and vital contributions to the transformation of postwar American politics.
Download or read book Dream West written by Douglas Brode and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Overturns conventional thinking that the Western genre is essentially conservative. Instead, Brode demonstrates that Hollywood liberals used Westerns to espouse a progressive agenda on a range of issues, including gun control, environmental protection, respect for non-Christian belief systems, and community cohesion versus rugged individualism. Doug Brode takes a new look at dozens of Westerns, including Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Red River, 3:10 to Yuma (old and new), The Wild Ones, High Noon, My Darling Clementine, The Alamo, and No Country for Old Men"--
Download or read book Socialist Cowboy written by Larry Savage and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Cowboy is a political biography detailing the life and activism of longtime New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos, one of the most colourful and controversial political personalities in the history of Ontario politics. Throughout his illustrious twenty-three year career as a member of the Ontario legislature, Kormos's unapologetic commitment to democratic socialism and his shoot-from-the-hip brand of small-town populism won him strong accolades back in his blue-collar hometown of Welland, while raising eyebrows at Queen's Park and within his own party. From his days as a student strike leader, to his short-lived time in Bob Rae's cabinet, to his run for the Ontario NDP leadership and his epic battles with the province's political establishment, the book chronicles Kormos's political trajectory, through interviews and archival research, with a view to unpacking the ideas and traits that have made him a New Democrat icon.
Download or read book Cowboy Politics written by John S. Nelson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of popular westerns are surprising in substance and significance, especially of late. Cowboy Politics shows how westerns in literature, cinema, and television face the challenges of Western Civilization even more than the perils of American frontiers. Its strategy is to compare key westerns with major theories of modern and postmodern politics. So it analyzes novels from Owen Wister to Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry. It focuses on films from the western revival beginning in the 1990s and featuring Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, while its interest in TV stretches from singing cowboys and Gunsmoke to David Milch’s Deadwood. Critics are apt to find in westerns the modern politics of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They tap devices of individuality, rationality, contract, sovereign enforcement, and representation to overcome the chaotic violence of a wild zone. Cowboy Politics examines how westerns often find such measures insufficient to tame the West as a culture of honor and anger that deteriorates into feud-al vengeance. Instead westerns see the West as the sunset land that is already growing old and moving on. So westerns seek fresh starts informed by comparing civilizations more than demonizing savages. Westerns worry that modern politics devolve into exploitation, oppression, spectacle, and terror. So they pursue supplements in such postmodern politics as republicanism, perfectionism, populism, feminism, and environmentalism. Especially westerns explore politics of persuasive speech-in-action-in-public, doing beauty, and self-reliance in the modes of Hannah Arendt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first two chapters of Cowboy Politics explain how westerns do political theory for popular audiences by making many of our myths: the symbolic stories of individuals and communities which we live daily. The next three chapters trace the initially modern theories of government in many westerns. Then western turns to republican honor, rhetoric, response-ability, and character tracking occupy the following four chapters. And these set the stage for another four chapters on western attention to postmodern terror, mythmaking, celebrity, spectacle, and forgiveness. The final two chapters analyze how “late,” “satirical,” and “transformative” westerns develop realist defenses for their surprisingly postmodern politics.
Download or read book Communists Cowboys and Queers written by David Savran and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hollywood Westerns and American Myth written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected.Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.
Download or read book Political Oppositions in Western Democracies written by Robert A. Dahl and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1966-03-11 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that the opposition has a right to organize and to appeal for votes against the government in elections and in parliament is one of the most important milestones in the development of democratic institutions. Mr. Dahl and nine collaborators analyze the role of the opposition in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. In introductory and concluding chapters, Dahl compares the patterns of opposition in these countries and makes predictions for the future. He carries forward on the basis of this evidence the theory of a pluralistic society he has explored in earlier books such as Who Governs? Mr. Dahl is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His collaborators are Samuel Barnes, Hans Daalder, Frederick Engelmann, Alfred Grosser, Otto Kirchheimer, Val R. Lorwin, Allen Potter, Stein Rokkan, and Nils Stjernquist. "This stately volume is distinguished by several unusual features. First, it straightforwardly focuses on a crucial issue of Comparative Politics without being vitiated by the familiar behaviorist semantics and jargon. Secondly, contrary to the ubiquitous trend in this country, flooded by discussion—more journalistic than scientific—on the emergent states, it centers on constitutional democracy in Western Europe, a region which for a decade and more had been badly neglected by the rampant computerizers. Thirdly, for the ten countries under discussion Professor Dahl was fortunate to enlist the services of genuine experts, the majority of whom are specialists in their field. . . . On the whole the volume is one of the major contributions to Comparative Politics that have appeared in this country for some time. The study of the issue as such as well as of the individual reviews is highly rewarding."—Karl Loewenstein, The Annals.
Download or read book The Great Cowboy Strike written by Mark Lause and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When cowboys were workers and battled their bosses In the pantheon of American icons, the cowboy embodies the traits of “rugged individualism,” independent, solitary, and stoical. In reality, cowboys were grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal workers, who responded to the abuses of their employers in a series of militant strikes. Their resistance arose from the rise and demise of a “beef bonanza” that attracted international capital. Business interests approached the market with the expectation that it would have the same freedom to brutally impose its will as it had exercised on native peoples and the recently emancipated African Americans. These assumptions contributed to a series of bitter and violent “range wars,” which broke out from Texas to Montana and framed the appearance of labor conflicts in the region. These social tensions stirred a series of political insurgencies that became virtually endemic to the American West of the Gilded Age. Mark A. Lause explores the relationship between these neglected labor conflicts, the “range wars,” and the third-party movements. The Great Cowboy Strike subverts American mythology to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and nature
Download or read book Rough Rider in the White House written by Sarah Watts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-10-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book, Sarah Watts probes this dark side of the Rough Rider, presenting a fascinating psychological portrait of a man whose personal obsession with masculinity profoundly influenced the fate of a nation. Drawing on his own writings and on media representations of him, Watts attributes the wide appeal of Roosevelt's style of manhood to the way it addressed the hopes and anxieties of men of his time. Like many of his contemporaries, Roosevelt struggled with what it meant to be a man in the modern era. He saw two foes within himself: a fragile weakling and a primitive beast. The weakling he punished and toughened with rigorous, manly pursuits such as hunting, horseback riding, and war. The beast he unleashed through brutal criticisms of homosexuals, immigrants, pacifists, and sissies - anyone who might tarnish the nation's veneer of strength and vigor. With his unabashed paeans to violence and aggressive politics, Roosevelt ultimately offered American men a chance to project their longings and fears onto the nation and its policies. In this way he harnessed the primitive energy of men's desires to propel the march of American civilization - over the bodies of anyone who might stand in its way."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Yankee and Cowboy War written by Carl Oglesby and published by Berkley Publishing Group. This book was released on 1977 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Views the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the downfall of Richard Nixon as linked conspiracies in a chain of ominous events testifying to the struggle between Northeastern and Southwestern power elites.
Download or read book It s the Regime Stupid written by Barry Cooper and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the Regime, Stupid! combines personal reflections with academic analysis in a way that is intended to provide an accessible narrative for a general reader with an interest in Canadian politics. There is no doubt that the structure of the Canadian federation is changing, and the reason is evident to nearly everyone. Canada is no longer economically run by the manufacturing and financial parts of the country centred in Ontario and Quebec. The West, and especially the cowboy West of Alberta, and the energy industry centred there and in Saskatchewan, have unsettled the familiar and complacent ways that Canadians have understood for generations to be simple truths. Barry Cooper suggests Stephen Harper may prove to be the last chance for Canada as a political regime. Whether Stephen Harper can effect the regime change that can keep Canada intact remains to be seen.
Download or read book Made In Texas written by Michael Lind and published by . This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone knows that President George W. Bush is from Texas. But few of us know the role his home state plays in his presidency, and in our country. In this dual biography of man and state, Michael Lind confronts the chief crises of Bush's presidency--the economy, the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism--and traces their roots back to Texas, a state, Lind argues, that yields salient clues to the future course of our country.Widely praised as an iconoclastic and brilliant political observer, Lind, a fifth generation Texan, chronicles the ethnic clash that produced modern Texas, the well-known plundering of the state's natural resources at the hands of its elites, and finally the deep strain of "Old Testament religiosity" which, having originated in Texas, now reaches all over the globe in the form of Bush's foreign policy.In the tradition of Gary Wills's Reagan's America, Made in Texas provides a wholly original cultural history that should change the way we understand not just our president, but our country.
Download or read book The Compton Cowboys written by Walter Thompson-Hernandez and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thompson-Hernández's portrayal of Compton's black cowboys broadens our perception of Compton's young black residents, and connects the Compton Cowboys to the historical legacy of African Americans in the west. An eye-opening, moving book.”—Margot Lee Shetterly, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Figures “Walter Thompson-Hernández has written a book for the ages: a profound and moving account of what it means to be black in America that is awe inspiring in its truth-telling and limitless in its empathy. Here is an American epic of black survival and creativity, of terrible misfortune and everyday resilience, of grace, redemption and, yes, cowboys.”— Junot Díaz, Pulitzer prize-winning author of This is How You Lose Her A rising New York Times reporter tells the compelling story of The Compton Cowboys, a group of African-American men and women who defy stereotypes and continue the proud, centuries-old tradition of black cowboys in the heart of one of America’s most notorious cities. In Compton, California, ten black riders on horseback cut an unusual profile, their cowboy hats tilted against the hot Los Angeles sun. They are the Compton Cowboys, their small ranch one of the very last in a formerly semirural area of the city that has been home to African-American horse riders for decades. To most people, Compton is known only as the home of rap greats NWA and Kendrick Lamar, hyped in the media for its seemingly intractable gang violence. But in 1988 Mayisha Akbar founded The Compton Jr. Posse to provide local youth with a safe alternative to the streets, one that connected them with the rich legacy of black cowboys in American culture. From Mayisha’s youth organization came the Cowboys of today: black men and women from Compton for whom the ranch and the horses provide camaraderie, respite from violence, healing from trauma, and recovery from incarceration. The Cowboys include Randy, Mayisha’s nephew, faced with the daunting task of remaking the Cowboys for a new generation; Anthony, former drug dealer and inmate, now a family man and mentor, Keiara, a single mother pursuing her dream of winning a national rodeo championship, and a tight clan of twentysomethings--Kenneth, Keenan, Charles, and Tre--for whom horses bring the freedom, protection, and status that often elude the young black men of Compton. The Compton Cowboys is a story about trauma and transformation, race and identity, compassion, and ultimately, belonging. Walter Thompson-Hernández paints a unique and unexpected portrait of this city, pushing back against stereotypes to reveal an urban community in all its complexity, tragedy, and triumph. The Compton Cowboys is illustrated with 10-15 photographs.
Download or read book Wild Horses of the West written by J. Edward De Steiguer and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Spanish explorers brought horses to North America, the horses were, in a sense, returning home. Beginning with their origins fifty million years ago, the wild horse has been traced from North America through Asia to the plains of SpainÕs Andalusia and then back across the Atlantic to the ranges of the American West. When given the chance, these horses simply took up residence in the landscape that their ancestors had roamed so long ago. In Wild Horses of the West, J. Edward de Steiguer provides an entertaining and well-researched look at one of the most controversial animal welfare issues of our timeÑthe protection of free-roaming horses on the WestÕs public lands. This is the first book in decades to include the entire story of these magnificent animals, from their evolution and biology to their historical integration into conquistador, Native American, and cowboy cultures. And the story isnÕt over. De Steiguer goes on to address the modern issuesÑ ecology, conservation, and land managementÑsurrounding wild horses in the West today. Featuring stunning color photographs of wild horses, this extremely thorough and engaging blend of history, science, and politics will appeal to students of the American West, conservation activists, and anyone interested in the beauty and power of these striking animals.
Download or read book Cowboy Culture written by David Dary and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colorful account of five centuries of cowboy culture details the life, history, customs, status, job, equipment, and more of the cowboy from sixteenth-century Spanish Mexico to the present.
