A canny interpreter of popular culture ... Kasson has gathered fascinating material on the man who in producing a pageant of American triumphalism, helped create the commercial world of entertainment that today we take for granted ... Kasson skillfully shows us Cody as performer, icon, impresario. And what a show he put on!” —Tom Engelhardt, The Los Angeles Book Review Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
. . . Kasson skillfully shows us Cody as performer, icon, impresario. And what a show he put on! —Los Angeles Times Book Review
A scholarly . . . readable cultural analysis. —USA Today
William "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the Wild West adventurer par excellence: he served as an army scout in the Civil War, skirmished with American Indians on the Great Plains and killed enough buffalo to help bring them perilously close to extinction. But if that were all he had done, few would remember him today. Buffalo Bill's real genius, historian Kasson (Marble Queens and Captives), a professor of American studies and English at UNC-Chapel Hill, argues in this insightful study, was in how he capitalized on his own history. As a showman who presented a packaged, sanitized representation of the Wild West, Cody anticipated both the Warholian cult of celebrity and the "real-life" melodramas of modern television, Kasson says. And in the process, he codified the archetype of the Western hero that persists to this day. Bill's performances in his traveling Wild West shows--featuring "authentic" scenes of Indian life, re-creations of historical events (including the Battle of Little Big Horn) and the thrilling presence of Buffalo Bill himself--were, she argues, a triumph of self-promotion and self-definition. As Buffalo Bill constructed a public identity quite apart from his private life, he magnified his role in history: "In Buffalo Bill's Wild West, historical events seemed to become personal memory, and personal memory was reinterpreted as national memory." This book will, of course, appeal to a curious cross-section of Wild West aficionados and scholars of 19th-century media--but because Kasson is a perceptive and skillful writer, it is also well suited to thoughtful general readers who like good, critical histories. With prose that's never too academic, she delivers a fine analysis of an American folk hero who was at once a shameless self-promoter and an important architect of our national myth of the Wild West. 132 b&w illus. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Best known for his "Wild West" spectacles depicting scenes of the American West, highlighting conflicts between while and Native Americans, William Cody, a.k.a. "Buffalo Bill," was a consummate showman, writes Kasson (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Cody's success, argues Kasson, relied as much upon the desire of late 19th-century Americans for stability in a rapidly industrializing nation that suppressed Native Americans, conquered the West, and engaged in overseas imperialism as it did upon the audience's need for entertainment. With exacting documentation, Kasson shows how deeply Cody was attuned to the public's impression so the American West as he balanced fiction with authenticity. Kasson presents a well-written, readable work that has interesting chapters on public memory and Native American participation in the "Wild West" shows. Recommended for public and academic libraries, especially those with collection on the American West.--Carles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College
Adult/High School-A thoroughly researched, entertaining, personal, and hu-man account of William F. Cody. Buffalo Bill was the consummate showman and frontiersman, equally at home hunting buf-falo on the prairies of Nebraska or performing privately for Queen Victoria at Earl's Court, London. He was, for generations of Americans, the real West and his Wild West Show was its true story. From his public-relations maneuvers, our images of Native Americans, Western landscapes, cowboy roundups, and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley would be born. Through carefully researched diaries, anecdotes, and other historical documents, Kasson demonstrates how Buffalo Bill created the spectacle and examines how his "subtle interweaving of fact, fiction, hype, and audience desire" fed Americans and Europeans starving for a glimpse of the "real" West. A century later, Americans would denounce the show's stereotypes as they became perpetuated in popular culture. Yet, paradoxically, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show did preserve some history and memory of the West at the very time it was disappearing to development. The book is enjoyable as both biography and cultural history, and has extensive notes. Liberally illustrated with glossy black-and-white portraits and photographs, as well as reproductions of posters, billboards, and political cartoons, it provides a fascinating study of the man and his time.-Becky Ferrall, Stonewall Jackson High School, Manassas, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
A fine, entertaining, scholarly study of one of the beloved (if, until now, little-understood) figures of American history—and of how he affected our image of ourselves. Mention the name "Buffalo Bill" (born William F. Cody), and a great circus-like show, with Indians and gunfighters, comes immediately to mind. According to Kasson (History/Univ. of North Carolina), that image constitutes only a fraction of Cody's influence upon American culture. In her captivating study, she is not content merely to give us a fresh biography of the man who was a writer of dime novels, a great showman, an energetic (if often frustrated) businessman, one of the nation's first celebrities, and (believe it or not) a figure of the 20th century. She also reveals the extraordinary influence and following he had among millions (including Queen Victoria), both here and abroad. It was Buffalo Bill's shows that indelibly inscribed on people's minds their image of the American West, of its native inhabitants, and of human character on the western trail. Cody's appeal and success seem almost foreordained, for his showmanship owed as much to his times as it did to his skill in sensing what his contemporaries wanted. A veteran of the Civil War and the Indians campaigns, Buffalo Bill (in Kasson's view) offered authenticity to Americans fearful about the closing of the frontier, the rise of cities and industry, and the decline of individual freedom. Here was a man of courage and integrity (he fought for us), a democrat of sorts (employing Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley with dignity and respect), and a self-made entertainer who, like P.T. Barnum, purveyed much bunkum while putting onaplain good show. One of Kasson's most significant contributions is her explanation of what today's world of entertainment, as well as our era's packaging of history as fun, owes to this single figure. A wonderful account that reveals as much about us as it does about the colorful man who is its subject. (132 b&w illustrations, not seen)
