The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description


When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of america. The Popular Frontier is the primary choice of essays to explore the transnational affect and mass-cultural appeal of Cody’s Wild West.

As editor Frank Christianson explains in his introduction, for the primary four years after Cody conceived it, the Wild West exhibition toured america, honing the operation into a financially solvent enterprise. When the troupe ventured to England for its first out of the country booking, its success exceeded all expectations. Between 1887 and 1906 the Wild West performed in fourteen countries, traveled more than 200,000 miles, and attracted a collective audience within the tens of millions.

How did Europeans respond to Cody’s vision of the American frontier? And how did European countries appropriate what they saw on display? Addressing these questions and others, the contributors to this volume imagine how the Wild West functioned within social and cultural contexts far grander in scope than even the vast American West. A number of the topics addressed are the pairing of William F. Cody and Theodore Roosevelt as embodiments of frontier masculinity, and the importance of the show’s most enduring persona, Annie Oakley.

An informative and thought-provoking examination of the Wild West’s foreign tours, The Popular Frontier offers new insight into late-nineteenth-century gender politics and ethnicity, the development of American nationalism, and the simultaneous upward push of a global mass culture.
 

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » 19th Century » The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

Recent Products