The American West : : Competing Visions / / Karen Jones, John Wills.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Jones, Karen,; Wills, John,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.) :; 15 B/W illustrations

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 FeaturesA general, lively and provocative introduction to the history of the American WestAn intellectual challenge to existing approaches and ideas about the WestA summary of the latest key arguments about the meaning of the WestIncludes 15 b+w illustrations and numerous maps

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Introduction -- Part One: Old West -- 1. Lewis and Clark: Mapping the West -- 2. Frontier Germ Theory -- 3. ‘The Gun that Won the West’ -- 4. Cowboy Presidents and the Political Branding of the American West -- Part Two: New West -- 5. Women in the West: The Trailblazer and the Homesteader -- 6. Women in the West: The ‘Indian Princess’ and the ‘Lady Wildcat’ -- 7. The Wild West Defiled: The American Indian, Genocide and the Sand Creek Massacre -- 8. The Thirsty West: Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and Las Vegas -- Part Three: Recreating the West -- 9. The Western Renaissance: Brokeback Mountain and the Return of Jesse James -- 10. The Arcade Western -- 11. Turn here for ‘The Sunny Side of the Atom’: Tourism, the Bomb and Popular Culture in the Nuclear West -- 12. Re-creation and the Theme Park West -- Bibliography -- Index