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As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.
For many years, movie audiences have carried on a love affair with the American West, believing Westerns are escapist entertainment of the best kind, harkening back to the days of the frontier. This work compares the reality of the Old West to its portrayal in movies, taking an historical approach to its consideration of the cowboys, Indians, gunmen, lawmen and others who populated the Old West in real life and on the silver screen. Starting with the Westerns of the early 1900s, it follows the evolution in look, style, and content as the films matured from short vignettes of good-versus-bad into modern plots.
From the dime novels of the Civil War era to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century to modern paperbacks, lurid fiction has provided thrilling escapism for the masses. Cranking out formulaic stories of melodrama, crime and mild erotica--often by uncredited authors focused more on volume than quality--publishers realized high profits playing to low tastes. Estimates put pulp magazine circulation in the 1930s at 30 million monthly. This vast body of "disposable literature" has received little critical attention, in large part because much of it has been lost--the cheaply made books were either discarded after reading or soon disintegrated. Covering the history of pulp literature from 1850 through 1960, the author describes how sensational tales filled a public need and flowered during the evolving social conditions of the Industrial Revolution.
ROBERT REDFORD has played many Westerners on the big screen: a romantic outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with Paul Newman, a sheriff in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1968), a mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), a rodeo cowboy in The Electric Horseman (1979) with Jane Fonda, a Montana rancher in The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed. He is the founder of Sundance, an admirer of Native American art and culture and a committed environmentalist. He embodies the best values of the American West.
The West is one of the strongest and most enduring place images in the world and its myth is firmly rooted in popular culture – whether novels, film, television, music, clothing and even video games. The West combines myth and history, rugged natural scenery and wide open spaces, popular culture and promises of transformation. These imagined places draw in tourists, attracted by a cultural heritage that is part fictional and mediatised. In turn, tourism operators and destination marketing organisations refashion what they present to fit these imagined images. This book explores this imagining of a mythic West through three key themes, travel, film and frontiers to offer new insight into how the imagination of the West and popular culture has influenced the construction of tourism. In doing so, it examines the series of paradoxes that underlie the basic appeal of the West: evocative frontier, a boundary zone between civilisation and wilderness and between order and lawlessness. It draws on a range of films and literature as well as varying places from festivals to national parks to showcase different aspects of the nexus between travel, film and frontiers in this fascinating region. Interdisciplinary in character, it includes perspectives from cultural studies, American studies, tourism and film studies. Written by leading academics, this title will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of cultural studies, tourism, film studies and media studies and all those interested in film tourism.
Why does this book that everyone knows but that few have read continue to be perennially attractive for the media? In answer to this question, this study throws a new light on the idea of frontier and on the meaning of the American Dream.
This updated edition of Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities offers readers multiple lenses for viewing and discussing local institutions. New chapters are included in a section titled “Museums Moving Forward,” which analyzes the ways in which local museums have come to adopt digital technologies in selecting items for exhibitions as well as the complexities of creating institutions devoted to marginalized histories. In addition to the new chapters, the second edition updates existing chapters, presenting changes to the museums discussed. It features expanded discussions of how local museums treat (or ignore) racial and ethnic diversity and concludes with a look at how business relationships, political events, and the economy affect what is shown and how it is displayed in local museums.
Examines contemporary cinematic representations of Argentine masculinities, the social construction of gender, and the financing of domestic film production following Argentina's 1990 change to a neo-liberal economic model.
Arizona is home to some of the region's most stunning national parks and monuments and has had a long tradition of strong federal agencies—along with effective local governments—developing and managing parklands. Before World War II, protecting sites from development seemed counterproductive to a state government dominated by extractive industries. By the late 1950s this state that prided itself on being a tourist destination found its lack of state parks to be an embarrassment. Gateways to the Southwest is a history of the creation of state parks in Arizona, examining the ways in which different types of parks were created in the face of changing social values. Jay Price tells how Arizona's parks emerged from the recreation and tourism boom of the 1950s and 1960s, were shaped by the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and have been affected by the financial challenges that arose in the 1990s. He also explains how changing political realities led to different methods of creating parks like Catalina, Homol'ovi Ruins, and Kartchner Caverns. In addition, places that did not become state parks have as much to tell us as those that did. By the time the need for state parks was recognized in Arizona, most choice sites had already been developed, and Price reveals how acquiring land often proved difficult and expensive. State parks were of necessity developed in cooperation with the federal government, other state agencies, community leaders, and private organizations. As a result, parks born from land exchanges, partnerships, conservation easements, and other cooperative ventures are more complicated entities than the "state park" designation might suggest. Price's study shows that the key issue for parks has not been who owns a place but who manages it, and today Arizona's state parks are a network of lake-based recreation, historic sites, and environmental education areas reflecting issues just as complex as those of the region's better-known national parks. Gateways to the Southwest is a case study of resource stewardship in the Intermountain West that offers new insights into environmental history as it illustrates the challenges and opportunities facing public lands all over America.
Best known to Americans as the “singing cowboy,” beloved entertainer Gene Autry (1907–1998) appeared in countless films, radio broadcasts, television shows, and other venues. While Autry’s name and a few of his hit songs are still widely known today, his commitment to political causes and public diplomacy deserves greater appreciation. In this innovative examination of Autry’s influence on public opinion, Michael Duchemin explores the various platforms this cowboy crooner used to support important causes, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and foreign policy initiatives leading up to World War II. As a prolific performer of western folk songs and country-western music, Autry gained popularity in the 1930s by developing a persona that appealed to rural, small-town, and newly urban fans. It was during this same time, Duchemin explains, that Autry threw his support behind the thirty-second president of the United States. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Duchemin demonstrates how Autry popularized Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and made them more attractive to the American public. In turn, the president used the emerging motion picture industry as an instrument of public diplomacy to enhance his policy agendas, which Autry’s films, backed by Republic Pictures, unabashedly endorsed. As the United States inched toward entry into World War II, the president’s focus shifted toward foreign policy. Autry responded by promoting Americanism, war preparedness, and friendly relations with Latin America. As a result, Duchemin argues, “Sergeant Gene Autry” played a unique role in making FDR’s internationalist policies more palatable for American citizens reluctant to engage in another foreign war. New Deal Cowboy enhances our understanding of Gene Autry as a western folk hero who, during critical times of economic recovery and international crisis, readily assumed the role of public diplomat, skillfully using his talents to persuade a marginalized populace to embrace a nationalist agenda. By drawing connections between western popular culture and American political history, the book also offers valuable insight concerning the development of leisure and western tourism, the information industry, public diplomacy, and foreign policy in twentieth-century America.