The American West

Competing Visions

Dados Bibliográficos

ID23779552
AutoresKaren Jones (0000-0002-4787-6830), Karen L Jones (0000-0002-1155-5816), John E Wills (0000-0001-8517-3207), John Wills
Ano2009
Data de publicação2009-03-21
Open AccessNão
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoAmerican West (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1515/9780748629732
OpenAlexW4251076814
ISBN9780748629732
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6

The American West used to be a story of gunfights, glory, wagon trails, and linear progress. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Hollywood movies such as Stagecoach (1939) and Shane (1953) cast the trans-Mississippi region as a frontier of epic proportions where 'savagery' met 'civilization' and boys became men.During the late 1980s, this old way of seeing the West came under heavy fire. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White forged a fresh story of the region, a new vision of the West, based around the conquest of peoples and landscapes. The American West: Competing Visions explores the bipolar world of Turner's Old West and Limerick's New West and reveals the values and ambiguities associated with both historical traditions. Sections on Lewis and Clark, the frontier and the cowboy sit alongside work on Indian genocide and women's trail diaries. Images of the region as seen through the arcade Western, Hollywood film and Disney theme parks confirm the West as a symbolic and contested landscape. Tapping into popular fascination with the Cowboy, Hollywood movies, the Indian Wars, and Custer's Last Stand, the authors show the reader how to deconstruct the imagery and reality surrounding Western history. Key Features A general, lively and provocative introduction to the history of the American West An intellectual challenge to existing approaches and ideas about the West A summary of the latest key arguments about the meaning of the West Includes 15 b+w illustrations and numerous maps

American west · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Civilization · Ethnology · Frontier · Globe · Glory · Hollywood · Manifest destiny · Movie theater · Politics · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Vision · American Environmental and Regional History · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · History