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Author: Julia Deitermann Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3638546292 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 18
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: A, San Diego State University, course: Modern American Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: Broncho Billy, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill - there hardly seems to be anyone in the world who has never heard about the heroes of American Western culture. Nowadays, cowboys are considered to be the embodiment of freedom and independence. Whereas cowboys have existed for hundreds of years, however, their image has changed over the centuries. In the 18thand 19thcentury, ‘cow boys’ were considered bad guys as they were bandits who remorselessly ambushed colonial farmers. It was not until the period after the Civil War that the word cowboy attained a positive connotation, being associated with rough men on horses who herded cattle. In the course of time, the cowboy figure was glorified and became a symbol of the American spirit. A plague in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming summarizes the glorification as it reads: “The cowboy is a mythic character in America. We admire him for his independence, his honesty, his modesty and courage. He represents the best in all Americans as he stares down evil and says, ‘When you call me that, smile’.” When the motion picture was invented at the end of the 19th century, some of the first silent movies were documentations about cowboys, embodying the frontier spirit of the American culture, which has always been connected to the westward expansion of civilisation and the conquest of new unknown territories. Thus both the frontier and “the Western oppose[s] Wilderness to Civilization” as Will Wright puts it in his book Six Guns and Society. Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robberycame to be the first Western narrating a story and fascinated the audience. In the following years, Western movies were most popular among the audience and were consequently produced in large numbers. Still today, they rank among the most beloved movie genres. Although the movie genre Western did not always stay at the peak of success, however, the boom was revived on a large scale in the 1950s. In this paper, I will try to reveal the fascination implicated in Western movies and analyse the figure of the cowboy against the background of the 1950s. In doing so, I will include the investigation of gender roles and the effects Westerns had on society. Casually, I will also draw on the popular TV Western series Gunsmoke which ought to serve as a demonstrative example. As far as the movie genre Western is concerned, the era of the 1950s was shaped by radical changes. [...]
Author: Julia Deitermann Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3638546292 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 18
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: A, San Diego State University, course: Modern American Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: Broncho Billy, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill - there hardly seems to be anyone in the world who has never heard about the heroes of American Western culture. Nowadays, cowboys are considered to be the embodiment of freedom and independence. Whereas cowboys have existed for hundreds of years, however, their image has changed over the centuries. In the 18thand 19thcentury, ‘cow boys’ were considered bad guys as they were bandits who remorselessly ambushed colonial farmers. It was not until the period after the Civil War that the word cowboy attained a positive connotation, being associated with rough men on horses who herded cattle. In the course of time, the cowboy figure was glorified and became a symbol of the American spirit. A plague in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming summarizes the glorification as it reads: “The cowboy is a mythic character in America. We admire him for his independence, his honesty, his modesty and courage. He represents the best in all Americans as he stares down evil and says, ‘When you call me that, smile’.” When the motion picture was invented at the end of the 19th century, some of the first silent movies were documentations about cowboys, embodying the frontier spirit of the American culture, which has always been connected to the westward expansion of civilisation and the conquest of new unknown territories. Thus both the frontier and “the Western oppose[s] Wilderness to Civilization” as Will Wright puts it in his book Six Guns and Society. Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robberycame to be the first Western narrating a story and fascinated the audience. In the following years, Western movies were most popular among the audience and were consequently produced in large numbers. Still today, they rank among the most beloved movie genres. Although the movie genre Western did not always stay at the peak of success, however, the boom was revived on a large scale in the 1950s. In this paper, I will try to reveal the fascination implicated in Western movies and analyse the figure of the cowboy against the background of the 1950s. In doing so, I will include the investigation of gender roles and the effects Westerns had on society. Casually, I will also draw on the popular TV Western series Gunsmoke which ought to serve as a demonstrative example. As far as the movie genre Western is concerned, the era of the 1950s was shaped by radical changes. [...]
Author: Kayci Leigh Kruhmin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Cowboys Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The cowboy has long stood as critical character in the story of the American West and as a representative for a variety of Western American values and understandings of the national past. However, the cowboy and his culture have been obscured by decades of popular media influence, myth-making, and widely accepted efforts to portray the West as something unique to the America and the world. In the following study, the historical cowboy’s lived experience during the trail drives of the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth take precedence. A concentrated effort is made to note which aspects of cowboy culture from a creative and social standpoint predate the cowboy’s transformation into an American media and mythical figure in the later twentieth century. By referencing the colorful and varied accounts of cowboys who worked during this period, this analysis highlights the unique and intricate social structures and relationships between cowboys from different regions throughout the West as they met on the cattle trails, including their relationships with the public both in the literary machinations of the East and the reality of their role among frontier communities in the West. Characterized by a shared occupation transient lifestyle, the cultural habits, practices, and traditions formed in this period converged into an overall cowboy culture that would become much more in the eyes of the American public than the presumed rough, uncivilized, and drifting predispositions of a lower-class wage laborer class in the West.
Author: Paul H Carlson Publisher: The History Press ISBN: 0752496476 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
The lives of American cowboys have been both real and mythic. This work explores cowboy music dress, humour, films and literature in sixteen essays and a bibliography. These essays demonstrate that the American cowboy is a knight of the road who, with a large hat, tall boots and a big gun, rode into legend and into the history books.
Author: R. Philip Loy Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786481153 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Many people have fond memories of Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent in theatres watching cowboy stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s chase villains across the silver screen or help a heroine out of harm's way. Over 2,600 Westerns were produced between 1930 and 1955 and they became a defining part of American culture. This work focuses on the idea that Westerns were one of the vehicles by which viewers learned the values and norms of a wide range of social relationships and behavior, and thus examines the ways in which Western movies reflected American life and culture during this quarter century. Chapters discuss such topics as the ways that Westerns included current events in film plot and dialogue, reinforced the role of Christianity in American culture, reflected the emergence of a strong central government, and mirrored attitudes toward private enterprise. Also covered is how Westerns represented racial minorities, women, and Indians.
Author: David Dary Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
A colorful account of five centuries of cowboy culture details the life, history, customs, status, job, equipment, and more of the cowboy from sixteenth-century Spanish Mexico to the present.
Author: Stanley Corkin Publisher: Temple University Press ISBN: 1439905681 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Though the United States emerged from World War II with superpower status and quickly entered a period of economic prosperity, the stresses and contradictions of the Cold War nevertheless cast a shadow over American life. The same period marked the heyday of the western film. Cowboys as Cold Warriors shows that this was no coincidence. It examines many of the significant westerns released between 1946 and 1962, analyzing how they responded to and influenced the cultural climate of the country. Author Stanley Corkin discusses a dozen films in detail, connecting them to each other and to numerous others. He considers how these cultural productions both embellished the myth of the American frontier and reflected the era in which they were made. Films discussed include: My Darling Clementine, Red River, Duel in the Sun, Pursued, Fort Apache, Broken Arrow, The Gunfighter, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Alamo, Lonely Are the Brave, Ride the High Country, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Author: Day Kirsten Day Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474415164 Category : Cowboys in popular culture Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
In the American psyche, the "e;Wild West"e; is a mythic-historical place where our nation's values and ideologies were formed. In this violent and uncertain world, the cowboy is the ultimate hero, fighting the bad guys, forging notions of manhood, and delineating what constitutes honor as he works to build civilization out of wilderness. Tales from this mythical place are best known from that most American of media: film. In the Greco-Roman societies that form the foundation of Western civilization, similar narratives were presented in what for them was the most characteristic, and indeed most filmic, genre: epic. Like Western film, the epics of Homer and Virgil focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors who worked to establish the ideological framework of their respective civilizations. Through a close reading of films like High Noon and Shane, this book examines the surprising connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres, shedding light on both in the process.
Author: Peter C. Rollins Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813171806 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
American historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the West has been the region that most clearly defines American democracy and the national ethos. Throughout the twentieth century, the "frontier thesis" influenced film and television producers who used the West as a backdrop for an array of dramatic explorations of America's history and the evolution of its culture and values. The common themes found in Westerns distinguish the genre as a quintessentially American form of dramatic art. In Hollywood's West, Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor, and the nation's leading film scholars analyze popular conceptions of the frontier as a fundamental element of American history and culture. This volume examines classic Western films and programs that span nearly a century, from Cimarron (1931) to Turner Network Television's recent made-for-TV movies. Many of the films discussed here are considered among the greatest cinematic landmarks of all time. The essays highlight the ways in which Westerns have both shaped and reflected the dominant social and political concerns of their respective eras. While Cimarron challenged audiences with an innovative, complex narrative, other Westerns of the early sound era such as The Great Meadow (1931) frequently presented nostalgic visions of a simpler frontier era as a temporary diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression. Westerns of the 1950s reveal the profound uncertainty cast by the cold war, whereas later Westerns display heightened violence and cynicism, products of a society marred by wars, assassinations, riots, and political scandals. The volume concludes with a comprehensive filmography and an informative bibliography of scholarly writings on the Western genre. This collection will prove useful to film scholars, historians, and both devoted and casual fans of the Western genre. Hollywood's West makes a significant contribution to the understanding of both the historic American frontier and its innumerable popular representations.
Author: William W. Savage Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 9780806119205 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Analyzes the modern myth of the cowboy as it appears in movies, advertising, the rodeo, and fiction, and gauges its effect on American thought
Author: Blake Allmendinger Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 019507243X Category : American literature Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
What are the connections between cattle branding and Christian salvation, between livestock castration and square dancing, between rustling and the making of spurs and horsehair bridles in prison, between children's coloring books and cowboy poetry as it is practiced today? The Cowboy usesliterary, historical, folkloric, and pop cultural sources to document ways in which cowboys address religion, gender, economics, and literature. Arguing that cowboys are defined by the work they do, Allmendinger sets out in each chapter to investigate one form of labor (such as branding, castration,or rustling) that cowboys perform in their "work culture." He then looks at early oral poems that cowboys recited around campfires, on trail drives, at roundups, and at home in their bunkhouses, and at later poems, histories and autobiographies written by cowboys--most of which have never beforebeen studied by scholars. He discovers that these texts not only deal with work but with larger concerns, including art, morality, spirituality, and male sexuality. In addition to spotlighting little-known texts, art, and archival sources, The Cowboy examines the works of Twain, Steinbeck, Cather,Norris, Dana, McMurtry, and others, and features more than 60 historic photographs, many of which have not been published until now.
Author: Julia Deitermann
Author: Julia Deitermann
Author: Kayci Leigh Kruhmin
Author: Paul H Carlson
Author: R. Philip Loy
Author: David Dary
Author: Stanley Corkin
Author: Day Kirsten Day
Author: Peter C. Rollins
Author: William W. Savage
Author: Blake Allmendinger