New scholarship on art and popular culture expands our understanding of the American West and its significance in the national imagination. The book is informed by literary theory, psychoanalysis, cultural history, and material culture and suggests new ways of looking at Remington's art. Mitchell's fresh take on the film Western shows how the imagined West raised powerful questions about race, nationalism, social policy, and the meaning of manliness in the twentieth century. He also shows how the gold rush welded California to the United States and how it rearranged left-behind families in the West. West's story is complex, but he makes crystal clear the mid century environmental and demographic revolution that occurred in this huge region.
Real women can rodeo.
LeCompte shows women fully engaged with that part of the Western world dominated by large animals, hard work, business enterprise, and danger. Her book describes women's physical and entrepreneurial achievements, as well as their role in professional athletics. This work addresses overarching regional issues concerning race, class, and gender as historians continue to grapple with the West's meaning in the building of the American experience. It addresses the fundamental issues of who came West and why, as well as why the West is the most rapidly growing American region and the most intensely urban. This lively study is a wonderfully human story, full of accounts of individuals and families in this broad and diverse region, peoples who changed this place and were changed by it.