S usan N ance . Rodeo

A significant factor sustaining rodeo is its use of romantic sentiment to celebrate a rugged West where man tamed both land and beast. The internationally known American cowboy ensures many popular books on rodeo, but there are comparatively fewer scholarly histories on the subject. One often finds a narrow approach to rodeo: rodeo as sport or entertainment, the division or organization of rodeo, and a few analyses of rodeos’ role in perpetuating ideals of conquest in the American West. Groundbreaking in this historiography is Susan Nance’s Rodeo: An Animal History, which looks at rodeo history from inside the chutes. Rodeo formed in the 1890s and is today a multi-million-dollar-a-year industry drawing crowds of up to seventy-five thousand people. Audiences have long been attracted to what today are categorized as extreme sports. Rodeo is an extreme sport that includes a narrative for fans centered on how it epitomizes the idea...

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