Becoming Western: Stories of Culture and Identity in the Cowboy State

Amazon.com Price: $19.95 (as of 03/05/2019 04:14 PST- Details)

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Description

In the Cowboy State (sometimes called Wyoming), the Wild West has never died. The West has long been the favored repository of the East’s cultural fantasies, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Eastern expectations and demands in large part shaped Wyoming’s image on this role. Becoming Western shows how the myth of the “American West” has acted as a force both in history and in individual lives.

Liza J. Nicholas interrogates the creation of Western lore by having a look at five stories that target, respectively, Jack Flagg, a Wyoming legend and the supposed model for Owen Wister’s Virginian; an equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill sculpted by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; the dude ranch; the creation of the American studies program at Yale; and a campaign for the U.S. Senate. Every story reveals the ways during which the East consciously imagined and manipulated the West and how Wyomingites in turn interpreted this identity, manipulated it, and put it to work for themselves. Becoming Western is an interesting study of how invented traditions can turn out to be potent cultural and political ideology on a local in addition to a national level.


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