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After a century of reinvention and, frequently, reinterpretation, Western movies continue to contribute to the cultural understanding of the United States. And Western archetypes remain as important emblems of the American experience, relating a complex and coded narrative about heroism and morality, masculinity and femininity, westward expansion and technological progress, and assimilation and settlement. In this collection of new essays, 21 contributors from around the globe examine the "cowboy cool" iconography of film and television Westerns--from bounty hunters in buckskin jackets to denizens of seedy saloons and lonely deserts, from Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford to Steve McQueen and Budd Boetticher, Jr.
Lydia Smith, a clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, calls the lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store's overwhelmed shelves "BookFrogs." When Joey Molina, a young BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore's upper room, he bequeaths his meager worldly possessions to her. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But they seem to contain a hidden message. As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey's suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood.
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After the Revolution, Americans abandoned the political economy of self-denial and sacrifice that had secured their independence. In its place, they created one that empowered the modern citizen-consumer. This profound transformation was the uncoordinated and self-serving work of merchants, manufacturers, advertisers, auctioneers, politicians, and consumers themselves, who collectively created the nation's modern consumer economy: one that encouraged individuals to indulge their desires for the sake of the public good and cast the freedom to consume as a triumph of democracy. In Luxurious Citizens, Joanna Cohen traces the remarkable ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the nationa...
"Nick Witham investigates how widely popular history books have gotten written, promoted, and institutionalized. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility is also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Witham has done extensive work not just in historians' archives but in publishers' files. His primary subjects are Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Howard Zinn-all popular historians who were explicitly concerned with the question of popularity. Collectively, they reveal the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture"--
Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the cult...
Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public trials contribute to a public reckoning with America’s racist past? Racial Reckoning investigates that question, along with the political pressures and cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these decades-old crimes. “[A] timely and significant work...Romano brilliantly dem...
"An examination of sociocultural nation-building processes in Mexico between 1810 and 1910"
Combining the nuanced perspective of an insider with the critical distance of a historian, Alexander Macaulay examines The Citadel’s reactions to major shifts in postwar life, from the rise of the counterculture to the demise of the Cold War. The Citadel is widely considered one of the most traditional institutions in America and a bastion of southern conservatism. In Marching in Step Macaulay argues that The Citadel has actually experienced many changes since World War II—changes that often tell us as much about the United States as about the American South. Macaulay explores how The Citadel was often an undiluted showcase for national debates over who deserved full recognition as a citizen—most famously first for black men and later for women. As the boundaries regarding race, gender, and citizenship were drawn and redrawn, Macaulay says, attitudes at The Citadel reflected rather than stood apart from those of mainstream America. In this study of an iconic American institution, Macaulay also raises questions over issues of southern distinctiveness and sheds light on the South’s real and imagined relationship with the rest of America.
A sweeping history of emotional life that explores how 'Dear John' letters became a rite of passage for American servicemen.