Download or read book Butcher s Crossing written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
Download or read book The Wild West written by Will Wright and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-08-09 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Wright explores the continuing popularity of the myth of the Wild West, demonstrating how, as a cultural icon, it speaks deeply to a desire for individualism and liberty. The author discusses the myth through market and social theory.
Download or read book The Mythical West written by Richard W. Slatta and published by ABC-CLIO. This book was released on 2001-11-20 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural journey down memory lane showcases how major Western figures, events, and places have been portrayed in folk legends, art, literature, and popular culture. Ever since the days of the 49ers and George Armstrong Custer, the Old West has been America's most potent source of legend. But it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction. Did you know, for example, that Annie Oakley was a talented marksman who shot an estimated 40,000 rounds per year while practicing and performing for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the late l800s? Or that many interpreters believe that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not just a fairy tale, but also a Populist allegory? These are just two of the folk legends dissected and examined in this veritable cultural geography. The volume covers everything from billionaire Howard Hughes and composer Aaron Copeland to Aztlan (the legendary first city of the Aztecs) and Area 51, the top-secret U.S. Air Force base at Groom Lake, Nevada, that has fascinated UFO and conspiracy buffs.
Download or read book The Mythical West written by Richard W. Slatta and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-11-20 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural journey down memory lane showcases how major Western figures, events, and places have been portrayed in folk legends, art, literature, and popular culture. Ever since the days of the 49ers and George Armstrong Custer, the Old West has been America's most potent source of legend. But it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction. Did you know, for example, that Annie Oakley was a talented marksman who shot an estimated 40,000 rounds per year while practicing and performing for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the late l800s? Or that many interpreters believe that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not just a fairy tale, but also a Populist allegory? These are just two of the folk legends dissected and examined in this veritable cultural geography. The volume covers everything from billionaire Howard Hughes and composer Aaron Copeland to Aztlan (the legendary first city of the Aztecs) and Area 51, the top-secret U.S. Air Force base at Groom Lake, Nevada, that has fascinated UFO and conspiracy buffs.
Download or read book The Mythic West in Twentieth century America written by Robert G. Athearn and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Briefly describes life in the West, and discusses the ephemeral nature of the region, western towns, the tourist industry, agriculture, fiction, and the ecology movement.
Download or read book The American West written by David Hamilton Murdoch and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wild West of Hollywood and American folklore is nothing more than a functional myth asserts D.H. Murdoch in this study, which presents a sustained analysis of how the myth originated and why.
Download or read book The Wild West written by Will Wright and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-06-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ′An extremely accessible, well structured and imaginative reading of market and social theory in terms of the myth of the Wild West frontier′ New Formations This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff). Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time. It is a unique discussion of market and social theory using cultural myth. Will Wright fully explores how issues of individualism, freedom and inequality in the myth of the Wild West connect up with questions of white, male superiority and environmental degradation.
Download or read book Red Lodge and the Mythic West written by Bonnie Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present, Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical forces to show how national and regional influences have contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western" images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation became part of the identity that defined one town."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Legends and Tales of the American West written by Richard Erdoes and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane to Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Frank and Jesse James, here are more than 130 colorful stories of the pioneers, cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, prospectors, and lawmen who settled the wild west, creating a uniquely American hero and an enduringly fascinating folk mythology. In this wonderfully boisterous treasury of tall tales, everyone and everything is larger than life and bragging is elevated into an art form. Many of these stories are of real people and real events; more than a few, however, grew taller and funnier as they made their rounds from wagon train to campfire to rodeo to miners' quarters. But even if it is far from established that Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were able to kill three men with one bullet or subdue ferocious grizzly bears with their fists, they come vividly to life here as beloved characters who have become part of the fabric of the American imagination. With black-and white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library
Download or read book The Significance of the Frontier in American History written by Frederick Jackson Turner and published by . This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 Reprint of 1894 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. The "Frontier Thesis" or "Turner Thesis," is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1894 that American democracy was formed by the American Frontier. He stressed the process-the moving frontier line-and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed consequences of a ostensibly limitless frontier and that American democracy and egalitarianism were the principle results. In Turner's thesis the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won very wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.
Download or read book Kill the Cowboy written by Sharman Apt Russell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the mythology of the cowboy should be replaced by new icons reflecting the realities of the modern West, including water shortages, overgrazing, and the need to protect western wildlife and wilderness.
Download or read book The Pioneers written by David McCullough and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important and dramatic chapter in the American story—the settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would come to define our country. As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River. McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them. Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.
Download or read book Myth of the Western written by Carter Matthew Carter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the nature of the relationship between the Hollywood Western and American frontier mythology? How have Western films helped develop cultural and historical perceptions, attitudes and beliefs towards the frontier? Is there still a place for the genre in light of revisionist histories of the American West?Myth of the Western re-invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio-cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical-theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65-year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies.
Download or read book The American Cowboy Chronicles Old West Myths Legends written by Thomas Correa and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the real Old West. The research presented here comes from what I've found during my more than forty-five years of researching American history, but especially what I've learned in regards to the other side of the myths and legends of the Old West. In 2010, I started a blog, The American Cowboy Chronicles, to share what I've learned and celebrate the virtues of America. My articles on the Old West have never been meant to dispel the myths or attack legends but to simply explain what I've found after taking a hard look, an honest look, an objective look, at the evidence that's available. Since evidence proves or disproves what we've all been told about the Old West by Hollywood and writers who are not objective researchers, this is my attempt at taking a fresh look at Wyatt Earp, Tom Horn, and others. But mostly, this book is about why the American Cowboy became America's quintessential role model. This book looks at why the American Cowboy represents American toughness, independence, and resilience to the rest of the World.
Download or read book Indo European Poetry and Myth written by M. L. West and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient, Indo-European heritage in the Greek material. Topics covered include the status of poets and poetry in Indo-European societies; metre, style, and diction; gods and other supernatural beings, from Father Sky and Mother Earth to the Sun-god and his beautiful daughter, the Thunder-god and other elemental deities, and earthly orders such as Nymphs and Elves; the forms of hymns, prayers, and incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative.
Download or read book The Wild West written by Frederick Nolan and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 14 May 1804, one Captain Meriwether Lewis and his companion William Clark led a thirty-three-man expedition to the new lands of Louisiana. 8,000 miles and two years later, after rafting up the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains, they reached the far side of the world, the Pacific Ocean. Fredrick Nolan explores the first US settlers of the American West, including the remarkable stories of unsung heroes and heroines, the bloody battles between settlers and the native American inhabitants, the crimes committed by corrupt Sheriffs, and the occasions when citizens had to take the law into their own hands. This is the story of the men and women who answered the call of the West.
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 187 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.
