num_pages: 864
description: 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.
language: English
title: Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
titlecomplete: Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
genres: History, Cultural, Criticism, American History, War, Anthropology, Westerns, American, Nonfiction, Politics
ratings_count: 267
series: Myth of the American Frontier
awards: awardedAt: 725875200000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Nonfiction
publisher: University of Oklahoma Press