The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience. The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister
Author: George Edward White
Publisher:
Published: 1968
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
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The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience
Author: G. Edward White
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-07-25
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0292745524
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst published in 1968, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience has become a classic in the field of American studies. G. Edward White traces the origins of “the West of the imagination” to the adolescent experiences of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister—three Easterners from upper-class backgrounds who went West in the 1880s in search of an alternative way of life. Each of the three men came to identify with a somewhat idealized “Wild West” that embodied the virtues of individualism, self-reliance, and rugged masculinity. When they returned East, they popularized this image of the West through art, literature, politics, and even their public personae. Moreover, these Western virtues soon became and have remained American virtues—a patriotic ideal that links Easterners with Westerners. With a multidisciplinary blend of history, biography, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience will appeal to a wide audience. The author has written a new preface, offering additional perspectives on the mythology of the West and its effect on the American character.
Owen Wister and the West
Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2015-03-16
Total Pages: 182
ISBN-13: 080614985X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWesterns are rarely only about the West. From the works of James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, stories set in the American West have served as vehicles for topical commentary. More than any other pioneer of the genre, Owen Wister turned the Western into a form of social and political critique, touching on such issues as race, the environment, women’s rights, and immigration. In Owen Wister and the West, a biographical-literary account of Wister’s life and writings, Gary Scharnhorst shows how the West shaped Wister’s career and ideas, even as he lived and worked in the East. The Virginian, Wister’s claim to literary fame, was published in 1902, but his writing career actually began in 1891 and continued for twenty-five years after the publication of his masterpiece. Scharnhorst traces Wister’s western connections up to and through the publication of The Virginian and shows that the author remained deeply connected to the American West until his death in 1938. Like his Harvard friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister was the sickly scion of an eastern family who recuperated in the West before returning to his home and inherited social position. His life story is punctuated with appearances by such contemporaries as Frederic Remington, Rudyard Kipling, and Ernest Hemingway. Scharnhorst thoroughly discusses Wister’s experiences in the West, including a detailed chronology of his travels and the writings that grew out of them. He offers numerous insights into Wister’s adroit use of sources, and provides revealing comparisons between Wister’s western works and the writings of other authors treating the same region. The West, Scharnhorst shows, was the crucible in which Wister tested and expressed his political opinions, most of them startlingly conservative by present standards. Yet The Virginian remains the template for the western novel today. More than any other Western writer of the past century and a half, Wister's career merits resurrection.
Guncrazy America
Author: Frank N. Egerton
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2018-10-06
Total Pages: 433
ISBN-13: 1546241590
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe conclusion of this professor-historian (emeritus) is that our gun culture had its uses in establishing American civilization, as slavery did. But we came to recognize (after a bloody civil war) that slavery was a gigantic mistake, and now I think it’s time to realize that our gun culture was a similarly gigantic mistake, though of a different kind. And we need to do what we can to minimize its horrible impacts and move on to a more positive development of a humane civilization.
Wanted Dead Or Alive
Author: Richard Aquila
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780252065279
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFollowing Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.
Racially Writing the Republic
Author: Bruce Baum
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009-07-29
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 0822392151
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRacially Writing the Republic investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin. The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965. Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson
Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West
Author: William R. Handley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-08-15
Total Pages: 275
ISBN-13: 1139440152
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.
The Hunter Elite
Author: Tara Kathleen Kelly
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2018-03-15
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 0700625887
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the end of the nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt, T. S. Van Dyke, and other elite men began describing their big-game hunting as “manly sport with the rifle.” They also began writing about their experiences, publishing hundreds of narratives of hunting and adventure in the popular press (and creating a new literary genre in the process). But why did so many of these big-game hunters publish? What was writing actually doing for them, and what did it do for readers? In exploring these questions, The Hunter Elite reveals new connections among hunting narratives, publishing, and the American conservation movement. Beginning in the 1880s these prolific hunter-writers told readers that big-game hunting was a test of self-restraint and “manly virtues,” and that it was not about violence. They also opposed their sportsmanlike hunting to the slaughtering of game by British imperialists, even as they hunted across North America and throughout the British Empire. Their references to Americanism and manliness appealed to traditional values, but they used very modern publishing technologies to sell their stories, and by 1900 they were reaching hundreds of thousands of readers every month. When hunter-writers took up conservation as a cause, they used that reach to rally popular support for the national parks and for legislation that restricted hunting in the US, Canada, and Newfoundland. The Hunter Elite is the first book to explore both the international nature of American hunting during this period and the essential contributions of hunting narratives and the publishing industry to the North American conservation movement.
American Crucible
Author: Gary Gerstle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-02-28
Total Pages: 543
ISBN-13: 1400883091
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt’s vision of a hybrid and superior “American race,” strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in “Anglo-Saxon” culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan’s and Clinton’s attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.
Heir to the Empire City
Author: Edward P. Kohn
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Published: 2013-12-10
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0465024297
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTheodore Roosevelt is best remembered as America’s prototypical “cowboy” president—a Rough Rider who derived his political wisdom from a youth spent in the untamed American West. But while the great outdoors certainly shaped Roosevelt’s identity, historian Edward P. Kohn argues that it was his hometown of New York that made him the progressive president we celebrate today. During his early political career, Roosevelt took on local Republican factions and Tammany Hall Democrats alike, proving his commitment to reform at all costs. He combated the city’s rampant corruption, and helped to guide New York through the perils of rabid urbanization and the challenges of accommodating an influx of immigrants—experiences that would serve him well as president of the United States. A riveting account of a man and a city on the brink of greatness, Heir to the Empire City reveals that Roosevelt’s true education took place not in the West but on the mean streets of nineteenth-century New York.
