The American West: Competing Visions. By Karen R. Jones and John Wills. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. viii, 344 pp. Cloth, $135.00, ISBN 978-0-7486-2251-1. Paper, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-7486-2252-8.)
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/97.2.503
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoThe American West attempts to summarize the trajectory of the study and popular perceptions of the American West in terms accessible to general readers. The results are mixed. Its dozen chapters are grouped into three parts. The first considers the traditional, persistent view of the West as shown in portrayals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; violence and the gun culture; and presidents posing as cowboys, from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Part 2 takes up the “new” western history of the 1980s and how its revisionist contributions—notably its attention to gender, Native American calamity, and the environmental ironies of sites such as Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam—have fared since then. The final chapters suggest how the prevailing image of the West is morphing yet again, its new face seen in video games and films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005). An obvious virtue of such an approach is its wide coverage. The book touches on exploration and diplomacy, implications of western aridity, dime novels and Indian policy, and homesteading and overland migration. Some of these topics are treated straightforwardly. A chapter on western women considers Carrie Call's experience on the overland trail and the remarkable photographer Edith Cameron and her years as a homesteader and hunter. Most chapters go beyond such simple presentation to examine how the episode in question has evolved in its portrayal by historians and its public perception. Thus Sarah Winnemucca has been pictured as clichéd Indian princess, cultural broker, and sellout to white authorities, and Mary Jane Canary, a.k.a. Calamity Jane, has been a “signifier of a wild and exceptional time,” comic cross-dresser, grubby saint, lesbian heroine, and, as David Milch describes her in his television series Deadwood (2004–2006), a “Shakespearian fool, speaking truth to power” (pp. 149, 167). Although the authors do not say as much, their book's structure seems to suggest that the West has increasingly become all image. The third part of American West deals almost wholly with the reimagined West, whether in yet another renaissance of western films, frontier mock-ups in theme parks, or such computer games such as Custer's Revenge (1982).
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