Download or read book The Western Hero in History and Legend written by Kent Ladd Steckmesser and published by Norman, University of Oklahoma Press [1965]. This book was released on 1965 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical analysis of the legends which have built up around such figures of the Old West as Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, Kit Carson and General George A. Custer.
Download or read book The Western Hero written by William Allen Wilbur and published by Addison Wesley Publishing Company. This book was released on 1973 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Legends of the Wild West written by Robert Edelstein and published by Centennial Books. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several hundred years, the West had been the land of dreams, an extraordinary region of hope, expansion and opportunity where European countries—and then the young USA itself—sent their finest explorers to plant seeds in a seemingly untapped, open landscape. This spirit captured the popular imagination in the Wild West, those raucous 30 years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of a new century. Within these pages, readers will explore true tales of rebels and heroes such as General George Custer, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull, among others. The Wild West was the American Dream on steroids. It was an age of gunfights and gold rushes, cowboys and Comanches, with the likes of Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid making their names. It forged extraordinary legends and even bigger lies, with everything fueled by dime novels written back East that encouraged folks to grab their share of a promise that was difficult for this hard land to keep. This book looks at all these mythical characters, the start of the railroad across the nation, the cost it all dealt to the Native Americans whose land was lost, and the way Hollywood still keeps the dream alive. As historian Richard White says, “People could go west and no matter their failures elsewhere, they had an opportunity to remake themselves. It’s a symbol for a kind of individualism that actually doesn’t exist in the West, but mythically it does.”
Download or read book John Wayne written by Instinctive Editorial and published by JG Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Wayne had it all. This Hollywood A-lister remains at the top of the list for fans around the world even 30 years after his death. Read the history of one legendary Hollywood actor in this beautifully illustrated presentation wallet which contains a 64 page full color book and six ready-to-frame 8x10" prints.
Download or read book Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History written by Graham Seal and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many times and places. The book also looks at the contemporary continuations of the outlaw hero mythology, not only in popular culture and everyday life, but also in the current outbreak of global terrorism. The book also presents a more general argument related to the importance of understanding folk and popular mythologies in historical contexts. Outlaw heroes have a strong purchase in high and popular culture, appearing in film, books, plays, music, drama, art, even ballet. To simply ignore and discard such powerful expressions without understanding their origins, persistence and especially their ongoing cultural consequences, is to refuse the opportunity to comprehend some profoundly important aspects of human behaviour. These issues are pursued through discussion of the processes through which real and mythical outlaw heroes are romanticised, sentimentalised, sanitised, commodified and mythologised. The result is a new position in the continuing controversy over the existence the 'social bandit' that highlights the central role of mythology in the creation and perpetuation of outlaw heroes.
Download or read book Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri written by Dick Steward and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early-nineteenth-century Missouri, the duel was a rite of passage for many young gentlemen seeking prestige and power. In time, however, social groups outside the ruling class engaged in a variety of violent acts and symbolic challenges under the rubric of the code duello. In Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri, Dick Steward takes an in-depth look at the evolution of dueling, tracing the origins, course, consequences, and ultimate demise of one of the most deadly art forms in Missouri history. By focusing on the history of dueling in Missouri, Steward details an important part of our culture and the long-reaching impact this form of violence has played in our society.
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 Western and Hard Boiled Detective Fiction in America written by Cynthia S. Hamilton and published by Springer. This book was released on 1987-06-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Western written by David Lusted and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Western introduces the novice to the pleasures and the meanings of the Western film, shares the excitement of the genre with the fan, addresses the suspicions of the cynic and develops the knowledge of the student. The Western is about the changing times of the Western, and about how it has been understood in film criticism. Until the 1980s, more Westerns were made than any other type of film. For fifty of those years, the genre was central to Hollywood's popularity and profitability. The Western explores the reasons for its success and its latter-day decline among film-makers and audiences alike. Part I charts the history of the Western film and its role in film studies. Part II traces the origins of the Western in nineteenth-century America, and in its literary, theatrical and visual imagining. This sets the scene to explore the many evolving forms in successive chapters on early silent Westerns, the series Western, the epic, the romance, the dystopian, the elegiac and, finally, the revisionist Western. The Western concludes with an extensive bibliography, filmography and select further reading. Over 200 Westerns are discussed, among them close accounts of classics such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, formative titles like John Ford's epic The Iron Horse, and early cowboy star William S. Hart's The Silent One together with less familiar titles that deserve wider recognition, including Comanche Station, Pursued and Ulzana's Raid.
Download or read book Polpop written by James E. Combs and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses various components of popular culture and the effects they have on politics. Some of the areas of mass culture which are discussed are: popular dramas, folk heritage, the Western myth, sports, religion, media, propaganda, and show business.
Download or read book The Myth of the American Superhero written by John Shelton Lawrence and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nation seems to yearn for redemption from the evils that threaten its tranquility, the authors maintain that Joseph Campbell's monomythic hero is alive and well, but significantly displaced, in American popular culture.
Download or read book It s Your Misfortune and None of My Own written by Richard White and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A centerpiece of the New History of the American West, this book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.
Download or read book Ernest Haycox and the Western written by Richard W. Etulain and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western fans today may not recognize the name Ernest Haycox (1899–1950), but they know his work. John Ford turned one of his stories into the iconic film Stagecoach, and the whole Western literary genre still follows conventions that Haycox deftly mastered and reshaped. In this new book about Haycox’s literary career, Richard W. Etulain tells the engrossing story of his rise through the ranks of popular magazine and serial fiction to become one of the Western’s most successful creators. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1923 with a degree in journalism, Haycox began his quest to break into New York’s pulp magazine scene, submitting dozens of stories before he began to make a living from his writing. By the end of the 1920s he had become a top writer for Western Story, Short Stories, and Adventure, among other popular weeklies and monthlies. Ernest Haycox and the Western traces Haycox’s path from rank beginner, to crack pulp writer, to regular contributor to Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Etulain shows how Haycox experimented with techniques to deepen and broaden his Westerns, creating more introspective protagonists (Hamlet heroes), introducing new types of heroines (the brunette vixen, the blonde Puritan), and weaving greater historical realism into his plots. After reaching the height of success with his best-selling Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944), Haycox moved away from the financially rewarding but artistically constricting Western formula—only to achieve his final coup with The Earthbreakers, a historical novel about the end of the Oregon Trail, published posthumously in 1952. Reconstructing the career of a popular literary giant, Ernest Haycox and the Western restores Haycox to his rightful place in the history of Western literature.
Download or read book Reader s Guide to American History written by Peter J. Parish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are so many books on so many aspects of the history of the United States, offering such a wide variety of interpretations, that students, teachers, scholars, and librarians often need help and advice on how to find what they want. The Reader's Guide to American History is designed to meet that need by adopting a new and constructive approach to the appreciation of this rich historiography. Each of the 600 entries on topics in political, social and economic history describes and evaluates some 6 to 12 books on the topic, providing guidance to the reader on everything from broad surveys and interpretive works to specialized monographs. The entries are devoted to events and individuals, as well as broader themes, and are written by a team of well over 200 contributors, all scholars of American history.
Download or read book Imagining Wild Bill written by Paul Ashdown and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.
Download or read book Decolonising Imperial Heroes written by Max Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heroes of the British and French empires stood at the vanguard of the vibrant cultures of imperialism that emerged in Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Their stories are well known. Scholars have tended to assume that figures such as Livingstone and Gordon, or Marchand and Brazza, vanished rapidly at the end of empire. Yet imperial heroes did not disappear after 1945, as British and French flags were lowered around the world. On the contrary, their reputations underwent a variety of metamorphoses in both the former metropoles and the former colonies. This book develops a framework to understand the complex legacies of decolonisation, both political and cultural, through the case study of imperial heroes. We demonstrate that the ‘decolonisation’ of imperial heroes was a much more complex and protracted process than the political retreat from empire, and that it is still an ongoing phenomenon, even half a century after the world has ceased to be ‘painted in red’. Whilst Decolonising Imperial Heroes explores the appeal of the explorers, humanitarians and missionaries whose stories could be told without reference to violence against colonized peoples, it also analyses the persistence of imperial heroes as sites of political dispute in the former metropoles. Demonstrating that the work of remembrance was increasingly carried out by diverse, fragmented groups of non-state actors, in a process we call ‘the privatisation of heroes’, the book reveals the surprising rejuvenation of imperial heroes in former colonies, both in nation-building narratives and as heritage sites. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Download or read book The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane written by Richard W. Etulain and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood’s saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn’t get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain’s account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity’s several “husbands” (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane’s reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004–2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on—raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.
