Research Catalog

Gunfighter nation : the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America / Richard Slotkin.

Title: Gunfighter nation : the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America / Richard Slotkin.
Author: Slotkin, Richard, 1942-
Publication: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	E169.12 .S57 1998	Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 850 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"Gunfighter Nation completes Richard Slotkin's trilogy, begun in Regeneration Through Violence and continued in Fatal Environment, on the myth of the American frontier. Slotkin examines an impressive array of sources -- fiction, Hollywood westerns, and the writings of Hollywood figures and Washington leaders -- to show how the racialist theory of Anglo-Saxon ascendance and superiority (embodied in Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West), rather than Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of the closing of the frontier, exerted the most influence in popular culture and government policy making in the twentieth century. He argues that Roosevelt's view of the frontier myth provided the justification for most of America's expansionist policies, from Roosevelt's own Rough Riders to Kennedy's counterinsurgency and Johnson's war in Vietnam."

Series Statement

Oklahoma paperbacks

Subjects

Genre/Form

History.

Note

Originally published: New York : Atheneum; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 767-828) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: The significance of the frontier myth in American history -- The winning of the West: Theodore Roosevelt's frontier thesis, 1880-1900 -- The White City and the Wild West: Buffalo Bill and the mythic space of American history, 1880-1917 -- Mob, tribe, and regiment: Modernization as militarization, 1883-1902 -- Mythologies of resistance: Outlaws, detectives, and dime-novel populism, 1873-1903 -- Aristocracy of violence: Virility, vigilante politics, and red-blooded fiction, 1895-1910 -- From the open range to the mean streets: Myth and formula fiction, 1910-1940 -- Formulas on film: Myth and genre in the silent movie, 1903-1926 -- The studio system, the Depression, and the eclipse of the Western, 1930-1938 -- The Western is American history, 1939-1941 -- Last stands and lost patrols: The Western and the war film, 1940-1948 -- Studies in red and white: cavalry, Indians and Cold War ideology, 1946-1954 -- Killer elite: The cult of the gunfighter, 1950-1953 -- Imagining Third World revolutions: The "Zapata problem" and the counterinsurgency scenario, 1952-1954 -- Gunfighters and Green Berets: Imagining the counterinsurgency warrior, 1956-1960 -- Conquering New Frontiers: John Kennedy, John Wayne, and the myth of heroic leadership, 1960-1968 -- Attrition: The big unit war, the riots, and the counterinsurgency Western, 1965-1968 -- Cross-over point: The Mylai massacre, the Wild Bunch, and the demoralization of America, 1969-1972 -- Conclusion: The crisis of public myth.

ISBN

9780806130316
0806130318

LCCN

97032043
9780806130316

OCLC

37712873
SCSB-11773505

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library