The Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America / Edition 1

by Richard Slotkin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806130316
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	04/15/1998
Edition description:	OKLAHOMA P
Pages:	864
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Editorial Reviews

In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin (English, Wesleyan U.) covers Theodore Roosevelt's and Frederick Jackson Turner's visions of the frontier, and the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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