American West

The Texas Rangers are an iconic symbol of both Texas and the American West. As citizen soldiers and lawmen the Rangers have left an indelible mark in the annals of history and American culture. This book offers a balanced and informative history of the Ranger corps. The author integrates both the traditionalist view of the Rangers as heroic defenders of Texan liberty and justice with the revisionist scholarship of more recent historians which has exposed a darker side to the corps including instances of brutality, corruption, racism and on occasion exceptionally high levels of violence. A Breed Apart: The History of the Texas Rangers explores the history, character and development of the Texas Rangers from their creation as an irregular frontier force to their current status as highly trained and well respected agents of law enforcement. The book provides an excellent resource for any reader wishing to understand why the Texas Rangers remain such powerful historical symbols and continue to exert such fascination in the public imagination.

Contemporary rural gentrification – the colonization of rural communities and small-towns by members of the ex-urban middle class – is a nationwide phenomenon that contradicts nearly two centuries of US urbanization. While previous research primarily describes such counter-urbanization as representing a profound divergence from previous patterns (i.e. urbanization, mass production/consumption, etc.), I contend that rural gentrification is best understood as the product of both continuity and change relative to the ideas/practices of Modernity and current postindustrialization. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a community in south central Montana, I present evidence that the choice by middle-class newcomers to migrate to the rural US is simultaneously the product of: 1) the continued efficacy of the Modern ideals of authenticity and progress; and 2) their aspirations to distinguish themselves as members of an emerging class faction – the postindustrial middle class (PIMC)– through their emphasis upon the production and consumption of experiences.

The Exposition Universelle of 1867 was the second of its kind to be held in Paris and was the largest to date. In 1867 the French Second Empire's "social" doctrine staged industry and labor not only as economic values but as cultural facts, envisioned in socio-ethnographic terms if not as forms of spectacle. The United States was only a second-tier player; however, for the U.S. organizers the Paris Exposition was a crucial opportunity for the country as it just emerged from the Civil War and entered Reconstruction. This paper seeks to identify aesthetic concerns and, more generally, an ambition to seduce the gaze of French and international viewers through the general organization and specific displays of the American exhibition, concentrating on exhibits offered by the Western states and territories. Images and objects from this region—particularly between the Rocky Mountains and California—played a significant, if perhaps unexpected, role in shaping a new aesthetic i...

This saga of the last Western manhunt begins, not in 1909—when it happened—but in the 1950s. Harry Lawton, a newspaperman for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, delved into an old case that he’d heard about around town: the story of Willie Boy, what he later called “the last Western Manhunt.” In this piece, I show the faults in Lawton's research through drawing on his own archives, and reveal both the cultural influence of Willie Boy as well as the ambiguities and tensions inherent in the story.  I conclude with a brief summary of Native American tellings of the Willie Boy story, which I use to question the yellow journalism of the turn of the century.

This article examines the racial dynamics and performative nature of US gun culture by analyzing the 2014 standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management. The standoff followed discernible scripts of white masculine privilege and drew on scenarios of conquest in the US American West, as Bundy's supporters gathered at his ranch and brandished their weapons in open defiance of the federal government. The act of brandishing their guns was a 'performance of belonging', a public, theatrical gesture that marks the bearer as a full participant in civic life and all its attendant rights and privileges. This belonging, however, is predicated on histories of white supremacist laws and settler colonialist violence. By reading gun culture in the United States through the lens of performance, this article traces the profound discrepancies between legal and practical gun rights and illuminates one of the most intractable debates at the center of US American life. Keywords American West • Cliven Bundy • gun culture • guns • militias • performance • race • theatricality journal of visual culture Brandishing Guns: Performing Race and Belonging in the American West Lindsay Livingston Perched on an overpass in the southwestern desert, civilian snipers took aim at the crowd of people below. In the days leading up to this moment, the gunmen had arrived from all over the United States, answering a call that had gone out in early April 2014 from several right-wing websites and

To start off this session on consumer behavior, this research examines trade and exchange in the drinking spaces in the outer nodes, or frontiers, of American settlement systems. These places are central to understanding North American and Atlantic trade networks because they illuminate the ways that economic and social capital are negotiated within local exchange systems and regimes of value. This project focuses on two frontier sites distanced temporally and geographically: the seventeenth century fishing station on Smuttynose Island in the Isles of Shoals, Maine and the nineteenth century gold mining town of Highland City, Montana. As a comparative study, I situate these sites within the larger anthropological dialogue on trade, power negotiations, and sociability. Through the use of a framework focused on informal economy, I examine how frontier men and women negotiated power, with a particular focus on resource-extraction communities. With regards to the Isles of Shoals and Highland City, I assert that the fishermen and miners at these two locales leveraged their positions at key international nodes in their respective trades for their own political and economic gains. The Shoalers deployed their economic gains to negotiate transactions within an informal economy based out of the tavern on Smuttynose Island. Drawing from current fieldwork, I hypothesize that if Highland City was a similar resource extraction community tied into larger trade networks, then the archaeological data will reveal that the same manner of negotiations within the saloons. However, none of this research could have taken place without the help of the Smuttynose Island Stewardship Program and the USFS.

There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

http://placesjournal.org/article/swingsites-for-singles/  The singles apartment complex originated in Southern California in the late ’50s and by the ’70s had spread nationwide, attracting attention with magazine stories illustrated with images of wet young flesh. Today they can seem a tawdry relic of a vanished era, yet the “swingsites” were a creative form of housing — and even a force for social progress.

As severe drought conditions continue to persist in the western United States, it has become increasingly clear that large-scale water development infrastructures are partially to blame. While groundwater pumping has been blamed for unprecedented levels of terrestrial subsidence, large dams, reservoirs, and diversion canals have had marked effects on regional hydrological processes and water availability. Mainstream environmentalist and anti-dam rhetoric often focuses on the politics, economics, and ecosystemic impacts of the crisis, as in historical accounts like Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert; documentaries like Patagonia's DamNation and Cody Sheehy's Beyond the Mirage; and the photographs of Edward Burtynksy, Peter Goin, and others. However, there is far less discussion surrounding the ways in which human-induced water crises have been impacting indigenous communities in the western United States since the so-called “Reclamation Era” between the 1930s and the 1970s, when thousands of large dams were built throughout the western US. As historian Jane Griffith argues, large dam construction reflected the process of "dam/ning," wherein water development efforts were infused with the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism and "tactics to preserve White settler memory, history and claims to land and water.”  In this essay, I examine the ways in which contemporary anti-dam and water-focused ecomedia in the western United States continues the process of "dam/ning" by largely excluding indigenous voices and failing to adequately account for indigenous experiences. Using examples of photography, museum exhibits, film, and social media campaigns, I highlight the ways in which indigenous artists are re-historicizing water development, drought, and indigenous displacement as the dystopic results of settler colonialism and seeking to re-orient contemporary drought discourse in ways that account for long-standing indigenous water rights struggles.

This paper is a study of a book of Western photographs by the contemporary photographer Richard Avedon.  While Avedon is probably best known for his magazine work and his photographs of the rich and famous, In the American West is his attempt to reinterpret and redefine the Western myth.  He shows us the West through portraits of people who live there, specifically those who are the most unfortunate--the underprivileged, disenfranchised and the bizarre.  By depicting the West as a bleak and barren environment that does not reward its inhabitants, Avedon demonstrates his awareness of myths of the West that extolled it as the land of new wealth, social harmony and progress.  And by choosing to illustrate his West through images, Avedon steps in the tracks of artists like Edward Curtis who set out to document North American Indians in the nineteenth century.

Thomas Richards, Jr., "'Farewell to America': The Expatriation Politics of Overland Migrants, 1841-1846," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Feb. 2017), pp. 114-152. © 2017 by the Pacific Historical Review. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

The gold rush in California and Oregon drew together a diverse group of people representing a range of ethnicities, nationalities, and socio-economic backgrounds.  However, during the era prior to Oregon statehood, historical accounts were almost exclusively limited to EuroAmerican perspectives.  Other stakeholders such as the Overseas Chinese, African Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans remained largely invisible, or were deliberately marginalized in the historiography of the development of the Oregon Territory.  Drawing upon archival research and archaeological data, this paper attempts to characterize the role multi-ethic communities played in the early gold mining areas and identify future directions for research on minority communities during this era.

The ten stories I explore in this reflective piece are some of the strands in the "cultural DNA" of America. They stay alive in the culture and lives of Americans, generation after generation. They contribute to the identity and character traits of Americans. They are capable of playing out in new ways, of being re-interpreted, adapted, re-used (and mis-used) by Americans again and again. It might be good to recognize such formative and identity-shaping scenarios, and to reflect on how well or poorly they might serve us--and how we serve them.

A 12-credit experiential learning course designed and implemented at Randolph College.

The American West is a tangled web of myth and reality—a region that has been enshrined in American movies, art, and popular culture as the site of rugged individualism and wide-open spaces. Underneath this veneer lies a constant and bitter struggle to define and claim the landscape. Natural resource extraction, ranching, U.S. government agencies, conservationists, recreators, and diverse Native communities all have contested and overlapping claims about how the landscape should be used and memorialized. In this program, we will explore the historical and contemporary struggle to claim and define western landscapes and the intersection of environmental justice with questions of religion, economics, and race in American culture.

This course is designed thematically, which allows us to use each aspect of the course—speakers, travel, seminar and images—to fully immerse ourselves in the weekly topics. We will explore the history and diversity of Native America and cultural landscapes, engage the ongoing process of settler colonialism, and move forward examining natural resource exploitation and Native displacement. We will investigate the pressing questions of environmental racism, as well as environmental justice movements and Native resistance. We will explore American sacred spaces, including wilderness areas and National Parks, as well as Native American sacred lands. Additionally, we will look at federal policies and court cases, popular myths and representations of the Wild West and Native Americans, and the politics of recognition and citizenship.

Throughout the semester we will read and discuss a variety of primary and secondary sources to help better illuminate the historical struggles and contemporary realities of Native American life, and the impact that these struggles have had on shaping American culture and society. We will view and analyze films and documentaries, art, poetry and literature to better contextualize how the media constructs and represents the American West and Native America. Through meetings with weekly guest speakers, we will directly engage with the conservationists, policy makers, historians, and Native leaders involved with these issues. Lastly, the best way to learn about a landscape is by moving through it. We will take several short trips around Virginia and to Washington, DC, and one weeklong trip to Utah to immerse ourselves in different topics related to the program.

The historiography of the Western gold rushes is punctuated with rhetoric of the American Wild West. The mining camp in particular has become an institution of the traditional frontier narrative, biasing interpretations of the composition of early mining settlements. Historical and modern accounts of Kanaka Flat describe a lack of women, yet archaeological data and documentary evidence indicated women were present and integrated into the community. Low-status Indian or Hawaiian women on Kanaka Flat were disregarded and not seen as legitimate partners or wives, suggesting that the idea of women often referenced more than sex or gender, but also ethnicity and class. Archaeological investigations challenge dated frontier archetypes, allowing recognition of the diversity of experiences on the American frontier. The invisible wives of Kanaka Flat illustrate that the camp was not a haven of single men and sinful women, but a complex community comprised of both bachelors and families.

Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012, 254 pages.Native Performers in Wild West Shows moves past a litany of excellent histories concerning the global influence of Wild West shows to create a "revisionist history" that begins in the late 19th century and ends in 2005. It also looks at various types of Wild West performances that took place around the world, including contemporary examples in Paris at Euro Disney and mock Wild West shows called Buffalo Bill Days in Sheridan, Wyoming. Anthropologist Linda Scarangella McNenly focuses on Native performer's experiences and perspectives that are suggested in archival materials and articulated in contemporary interviews with the intention of explaining how Canadian and American Native participants interacted with dominant society through this venue to produce subjective social meanings. Her revisionist history is intended to provide an examination and a re-examination of cultural, social and political expressions of Native identity and agency. Considering the span of both time and place, this is a challenging undertaking.Scarangella McNenly adopts Mary Pratt's well-used concept of "contact zone" as a space that allows for negotiations of power within a colonial context. The idea of the contact zone has been employed by anthropologists and historians frequently in discussions of North American fairs, powwows and rodeo competitions as a way of understanding how indigenous peoples have negotiated social identities and acted as political agents. Most recently, Mary Ellen Keim (2011) used this concept to weave together a holistic view of rodeo in Canada as a space where new identities and new relationships between indigenous and settler communities were crafted, contested and negotiated. Scarangella McNenly's adds Ortner's emphasis on "practice theory" to allow for an examination of such processes through discourses and representations, and to clarify how free will and intentions are part of webs of power structures and relationships. Multi-sited research is employed as a way to facilitate her "research pathway," which is based on "an experience" that cuts across places, ethnicities, archival records (including print media), oral narratives and personal accounts. This book is organized as a series of case studies and is intended to "examine processes, encounters, and relationships through time and space."Chapters 1 through 4 focus on Wild West performances and productions in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, ending with a brief overview of the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch, last produced in 1932. Chapter 1 provides a fleeting introduction into the basics of American Wild West shows as an international sensation, where the performance of imperialism disseminated ideas about race, progress and indigenous peoples alongside world's fairs, museums displays and dime store novels. Chapter 2 and the remaining chapters follow a similar pattern: the first section of each uses archival sources and popular media to explain the context of Native participation, and the closing section brings "forward Native performers' perspectives and experiences to explore how they engaged with and negotiated these encounters." Chapter 2 looks at American Wild West shows as employers and Native performers as employees. Scarangella McNenly realizes her intention of providing Native perspectives on historic experiences through archived letters, show programs and personal memoires to outline the reasons why Native performers wanted to work in Wild West shows, including work for work's sake, monetary advantage and travel. Chapter 3 explores Wild West shows as performances of identity juxtaposing stereotypical representations of exotic cowboys and Indians in various forms of Western print media with "warrior identity" created by Native participants. …

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion.

Published as Andrew Isenberg, and Thomas Richards, Jr., "Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Feb., 2017), pp. 4-17. © 2017 by the Pacific Historical Review. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

This licentiate establishes the conceptual and methodological foundation for a doctoral thesis on how film creates and sustains a symbolic universe. Rather than addressing the ultimate thesis problem, the purpose of this licentiate is to lay the groundwork for that project. It introduces and examines the film Unforgiven as the empirical data, and it locates Unforgiven in the genre and tradition of the Western film.

The licentiate has five subsidiary purposes: 1) it discusses the theoretical and methodological perspective of symbolic interactionism; 2) it describes and examines the Western genre in film and earlier media; 3) it proposes a basic typology for the Western film; 4) it presents a synopsis and overview of the film Unforgiven, and 5) it reviews the literature on Unforgiven, extracting key themes to establish the thematic taxonomy that permits a robust analysis of the film.

Tourism and popular culture have long been mainstays of the American West. Combining dude ranching and Hollywood dude ranch movies, this project explores how the tourism industry and its pop cultural representation, produced a sometimes contested sense of the American West between 1922 and 1950. The Dude Ranchers’ Association (DRA) and the Hollywood studio system were two primary regionalizing institutions both located in the West that produced discourses that bound the West, and articulated the symbols that represent the West. In doing so they become institutions whose practices normalized, policed, and questioned the West (Paasi 2002). Discourse analysis of dude ranch archival materials and sixty-one dude ranch movies produced between 1922 and 1950 reveals a battle over the production of regional identity between the
DRA (the industry’s largest representative organization) and Hollywood. Interweaving class, gender, violence and vigilantism that shaped a sense of region, the DRA’s efforts to maintain control of the region’s meaning was eroded by the increasing discursive power of Hollywood. However, ultimately both institutions worked to shape a sense of the West for their own needs as well as to meet the expectations of their patrons.

This was a special issue of the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, dedicated to Frederick DeLongchamps, the state's premier historical architect. I authored a biography on the architect to introduce the topic. Other articles are equally valuable in assessing his work, which extended to other places in the nation including California and Florida.

This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that
includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler
colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially
grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position,
but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states.
We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West.

This articles compares two nineteenth-century disasters that occurred on the Comstock Mining District in America's Far West. The first is the 1869 Yellow Jacket fire, which claimed over thirty lives. Records of those who died afford an opportunity to consider shifts of miners who died that day. This event is compared with the 1873 explosion of an apartment house, where one of the tenants was storing dynamite. The events reflect different aspects of the dangers of living in a mining district: the first claimed the lives of miners; the second claimed the lives of other people who were simply living near industry.