Download or read book The American Western of the 1950s An Analysis of Cowboy Culture against the Background of the Era written by Julia Deitermann and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2006-09-18 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: A, San Diego State University, course: Modern American Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: Broncho Billy, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill - there hardly seems to be anyone in the world who has never heard about the heroes of American Western culture. Nowadays, cowboys are considered to be the embodiment of freedom and independence. Whereas cowboys have existed for hundreds of years, however, their image has changed over the centuries. In the 18thand 19thcentury, ‘cow boys’ were considered bad guys as they were bandits who remorselessly ambushed colonial farmers. It was not until the period after the Civil War that the word cowboy attained a positive connotation, being associated with rough men on horses who herded cattle. In the course of time, the cowboy figure was glorified and became a symbol of the American spirit. A plague in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming summarizes the glorification as it reads: “The cowboy is a mythic character in America. We admire him for his independence, his honesty, his modesty and courage. He represents the best in all Americans as he stares down evil and says, ‘When you call me that, smile’.” When the motion picture was invented at the end of the 19th century, some of the first silent movies were documentations about cowboys, embodying the frontier spirit of the American culture, which has always been connected to the westward expansion of civilisation and the conquest of new unknown territories. Thus both the frontier and “the Western oppose[s] Wilderness to Civilization” as Will Wright puts it in his book Six Guns and Society. Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robberycame to be the first Western narrating a story and fascinated the audience. In the following years, Western movies were most popular among the audience and were consequently produced in large numbers. Still today, they rank among the most beloved movie genres. Although the movie genre Western did not always stay at the peak of success, however, the boom was revived on a large scale in the 1950s. In this paper, I will try to reveal the fascination implicated in Western movies and analyse the figure of the cowboy against the background of the 1950s. In doing so, I will include the investigation of gender roles and the effects Westerns had on society. Casually, I will also draw on the popular TV Western series Gunsmoke which ought to serve as a demonstrative example. As far as the movie genre Western is concerned, the era of the 1950s was shaped by radical changes. [...]
Download or read book Kick Off Your Boots and Stay Awhile written by Kayci Leigh Kruhmin and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cowboy has long stood as critical character in the story of the American West and as a representative for a variety of Western American values and understandings of the national past. However, the cowboy and his culture have been obscured by decades of popular media influence, myth-making, and widely accepted efforts to portray the West as something unique to the America and the world. In the following study, the historical cowboy’s lived experience during the trail drives of the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth take precedence. A concentrated effort is made to note which aspects of cowboy culture from a creative and social standpoint predate the cowboy’s transformation into an American media and mythical figure in the later twentieth century. By referencing the colorful and varied accounts of cowboys who worked during this period, this analysis highlights the unique and intricate social structures and relationships between cowboys from different regions throughout the West as they met on the cattle trails, including their relationships with the public both in the literary machinations of the East and the reality of their role among frontier communities in the West. Characterized by a shared occupation transient lifestyle, the cultural habits, practices, and traditions formed in this period converged into an overall cowboy culture that would become much more in the eyes of the American public than the presumed rough, uncivilized, and drifting predispositions of a lower-class wage laborer class in the West.
Download or read book The Cowboy Way written by Paul H Carlson and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2006-11-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of American cowboys have been both real and mythic. This work explores cowboy music dress, humour, films and literature in sixteen essays and a bibliography. These essays demonstrate that the American cowboy is a knight of the road who, with a large hat, tall boots and a big gun, rode into legend and into the history books.
Download or read book 1950s Western Roundup written by B. Bell and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-06-30 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most exciting periods in American History was that of the Wild West. Tales of gunfights and outlaws have captivated the imagination of readers since that era, but this period of lawlessness and excitement held particular sway over television viewers of the 1950s. Darkly shrouded outlaws became garishly dressed heroes when they leapt from their saddles to the small screen. 1950s WESTERN ROUNDUP returns to those celluloid days of a revised yesteryear, taking real outlaws and sanitizing them into good, mostly upstanding citizens! Relive this odd, yet important era in TV and Western fiction history as three of today's best authors put tassels and morality on some of the baddest people to ever ride the range in 1950s WESTERN ROUNDUP! From Pro Se Productions.
Download or read book The Cowboy Hero and Its Audience written by Alf H. Walle and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Demonstrating how the methods of popular culture scholarship can be merged with those of marketing and consumer research, a mutually beneficial strategy of analysis is showcased."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Westerns and American Culture 1930 1955 written by R. Philip Loy and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people have fond memories of Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent in theatres watching cowboy stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s chase villains across the silver screen or help a heroine out of harm's way. Over 2,600 Westerns were produced between 1930 and 1955 and they became a defining part of American culture. This work focuses on the idea that Westerns were one of the vehicles by which viewers learned the values and norms of a wide range of social relationships and behavior, and thus examines the ways in which Western movies reflected American life and culture during this quarter century. Chapters discuss such topics as the ways that Westerns included current events in film plot and dialogue, reinforced the role of Christianity in American culture, reflected the emergence of a strong central government, and mirrored attitudes toward private enterprise. Also covered is how Westerns represented racial minorities, women, and Indians.
Download or read book Wanted Dead Or Alive written by Richard Aquila and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.
Download or read book Contemporary Cowboys written by Clint W. Jones and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture expands and develops an understanding of recent cultural shifts in representations of the American cowboy and “the West” as vital components of American identity and values. The chapters in this book examine they ways in which twenty-first century representations have updated the figure of the cowboy, considering not only traditionally analyzed sources, such as television, film, and literature, but also less studied areas such as comics, and music. The contributors probe the cowboy archetype and western mythology with critical theory, feminist critiques, philosophy, history, cultural analysis, and more.
Download or read book The Cowboy His Characteristics His Equipment and His Part in the Development of the West 1922 written by Philip Ashton Rollins and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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.
Download or read book The Creation of the Cowboy Hero written by Jeremy Agnew and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.
Download or read book Cowboys As Cold Warriors written by Stanley Corkin and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the United States emerged from World War II with superpower status and quickly entered a period of economic prosperity, the stresses and contradictions of the Cold War nevertheless cast a shadow over American life. The same period marked the heyday of the western film. Cowboys as Cold Warriors shows that this was no coincidence. It examines many of the significant westerns released between 1946 and 1962, analyzing how they responded to and influenced the cultural climate of the country. Author Stanley Corkin discusses a dozen films in detail, connecting them to each other and to numerous others. He considers how these cultural productions both embellished the myth of the American frontier and reflected the era in which they were made. Films discussed include: My Darling Clementine, Red River, Duel in the Sun, Pursued, Fort Apache, Broken Arrow, The Gunfighter, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Alamo, Lonely Are the Brave, Ride the High Country, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Download or read book Cowboy Classics written by Day Kirsten Day and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American psyche, the "e;Wild West"e; is a mythic-historical place where our nation's values and ideologies were formed. In this violent and uncertain world, the cowboy is the ultimate hero, fighting the bad guys, forging notions of manhood, and delineating what constitutes honor as he works to build civilization out of wilderness. Tales from this mythical place are best known from that most American of media: film. In the Greco-Roman societies that form the foundation of Western civilization, similar narratives were presented in what for them was the most characteristic, and indeed most filmic, genre: epic. Like Western film, the epics of Homer and Virgil focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors who worked to establish the ideological framework of their respective civilizations. Through a close reading of films like High Noon and Shane, this book examines the surprising connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres, shedding light on both in the process.
Download or read book Hollywood s West written by Peter C. Rollins and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-11-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the West has been the region that most clearly defines American democracy and the national ethos. Throughout the twentieth century, the "frontier thesis" influenced film and television producers who used the West as a backdrop for an array of dramatic explorations of America's history and the evolution of its culture and values. The common themes found in Westerns distinguish the genre as a quintessentially American form of dramatic art. In Hollywood's West, Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor, and the nation's leading film scholars analyze popular conceptions of the frontier as a fundamental element of American history and culture. This volume examines classic Western films and programs that span nearly a century, from Cimarron (1931) to Turner Network Television's recent made-for-TV movies. Many of the films discussed here are considered among the greatest cinematic landmarks of all time. The essays highlight the ways in which Westerns have both shaped and reflected the dominant social and political concerns of their respective eras. While Cimarron challenged audiences with an innovative, complex narrative, other Westerns of the early sound era such as The Great Meadow (1931) frequently presented nostalgic visions of a simpler frontier era as a temporary diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression. Westerns of the 1950s reveal the profound uncertainty cast by the cold war, whereas later Westerns display heightened violence and cynicism, products of a society marred by wars, assassinations, riots, and political scandals. The volume concludes with a comprehensive filmography and an informative bibliography of scholarly writings on the Western genre. This collection will prove useful to film scholars, historians, and both devoted and casual fans of the Western genre. Hollywood's West makes a significant contribution to the understanding of both the historic American frontier and its innumerable popular representations.
Download or read book Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers written by Richard W. Slatta and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of the American West, perhaps inspired by NAFTA and Internet communication, are expanding their intellectual horizons across borders north and south. This collection of essays functions as a how-to guide to comparative frontier research in the Americas. Frontiers specialist Richard W. Slatta presents topics, techniques, and methods that will intrigue social science professionals and western history buffs alike as he explores the frontiers of North and South America from Spanish colonial days into the twentieth century. The always popular cowboy is joined by the fascinating gaucho, llanero, vaquero, and charro as Slatta compares their work techniques, roundups, songs, tack, lingo, equestrian culture, and vices. We visit saloons and pulperias as well as plains and pampas, and Slatta expertly compares clothing, weather, terrain, diets, alcoholic beverages, card games, and military tactics. From primary records we learn how Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans became the ranch hands, cowmen, and buckaroos of the Americas, and why their dependence on the ranch cattle industry kept them bachelors and landless peons.
Download or read book The Cowboy Hero written by William W. Savage and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the modern myth of the cowboy as it appears in movies, advertising, the rodeo, and fiction, and gauges its effect on American thought
Download or read book Ride Boldly Ride written by Mary Lea Bandy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study of the Western covers its history from the early silent era to recent spins on the genre in films such as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, True Grit, and Cowboys & Aliens. While providing fresh perspectives on landmarks such as Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Wild Bunch, the authors also pay tribute to many under-appreciated Westerns. Ride, Boldly Ride explores major phases of the Western’s development, including silent era oaters, A-production classics of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the more psychologically complex portrayals of the Westerner that emerged after World War II. The authors also examine various forms of genre-revival and genre-revisionism that have recurred over the past half-century, culminating especially in the masterworks of Clint Eastwood. They consider themes such as the inner life of the Western hero, the importance of the natural landscape, the roles played by women, the tension between myth and history, the depiction of the Native American, and the juxtaposing of comedy and tragedy. Written in clear, engaging prose, this is the only survey that encompasses the entire history of this long-lived and much-loved genre.
