America's Top-Rated Cities provides current, comprehensive statistical information and other essential data in one easy-to-use source on the top 100 cities that have been cited as the best for business and living in the United States.
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.
"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.
For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.
In the years between 1940 and 2000, the American Far West went from being a relative backwater of the United States to a considerably more developed, modern, and prosperous region—one capable of influencing not just the nation but the world. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the population of the West had multiplied more than four times since 1940, and western states had transitioned from rural to urban, becoming the most urbanized section of the country. Massive investment, both private and public, in the western economy had produced regional prosperity, and the tourism industry had undergone massive expansion, altering the ways Americans identified with the West. In The Mobilized American West, 1940–2000, John M. Findlay presents a historical overview of the American West in its decades of modern development. During the years of U.S. mobilization for World War II and the Cold War, the West remained a significant, distinct region even as its development accelerated rapidly and, in many ways, it became better integrated into the rest of the country. By examining events and trends that occurred in the West, Findlay argues that a distinctive, region-wide political culture developed in the western states from a commitment to direct democracy, the role played by the federal government in owning and managing such a large amount of land, and the way different groups of westerners identified with and defined the region. While illustrating western distinctiveness, Findlay also aims to show how, in its sustaining mobilization for war, the region became tethered to the entire nation more than ever before, but on its own terms. Findlay presents an innovative approach to viewing the American West as a region distinctive of the United States, one that occasionally stood ahead of, at odds with, and even in defiance of the nation.
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, star of the American West, began his journey to fame at age twenty-three, when he met writer Ned Buntline. The pulp novels Buntline later penned were loosely based on Cody’s scouting and bison-hunting adventures and sparked a national sensation. Other writers picked up the living legend of “Buffalo Bill” for their own pulp novels, and in 1872 Buntline produced a theatrical show starring Cody himself. In 1883, Cody opened his own show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which ultimately became the foundation for the world’s image of the American frontier. After the Civil War, new transcontinental railroads aided rapid westward expansion, fostering Americans’ long-held fascination with their western frontier. The railroads enabled traveling shows to move farther and faster, and improved printing technologies allowed those shows to print in large sizes and quantities lively color posters and advertisements. Cody’s show team partnered with printers, lithographers, photographers, and iconic western American artists, such as Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, to create posters and advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Circuses and other shows used similar techniques, but Cody’s team perfected them, creating unique posters that branded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as the true Wild West experience. They helped attract patrons from across the nation and ultimately from around the world at every stop the traveling show made. In Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Michelle Delaney showcases these numerous posters in full color, many of which have never before been reproduced, pairing them with new research into previously inaccessible manuscript and photograph collections. Her study also includes Cody’s correspondence with his staff, revealing the showman’s friendships with notable American and European artists and his show’s complex, modern publicity model. Beautifully designed, Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West presents a new perspective on the art, innovation, and advertising acumen that created the international frontier experience of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
In this second edition of The Rise of Western Power, Jonathan Daly retains the broad sweep of his introduction to the history of Western civilization as well as introducing new material into every chapter, enhancing the book's global coverage and engaging with the latest historical debates. The West's history is one of extraordinary success: no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. Daly charts the West's achievements-representative government, the free enterprise system, modern science, and the rule of law-as well as its misdeeds: two World Wars, the Holocaust, imperialistic domination, and the Atlantic slave trade. Taking us through a series of revolutions, he explores the contributions of other cultures and civilizations to the West's emergence, weaving in historical, geographical, and cultural factors. The new edition also contains more material on themes such as the environment and gender, and additional coverage of India, China and the Islamic world. Daly's engaging narrative is accompanied by timelines, maps and further reading suggestions, along with a companion website featuring study questions, over 100 primary sources and 60 historical maps to enable further study.