Butcher's Crossing

Butcher's Crossing PDF Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Butcher's Crossing

Butcher's Crossing PDF Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

The Wild West

The Wild West PDF Author: Will Wright
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761952336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Will Wright explores the continuing popularity of the myth of the Wild West, demonstrating how, as a cultural icon, it speaks deeply to a desire for individualism and liberty. The author discusses the myth through market and social theory.

The Mythical West

The Mythical West PDF Author: Richard W. Slatta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576075885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
This cultural journey down memory lane showcases how major Western figures, events, and places have been portrayed in folk legends, art, literature, and popular culture. Ever since the days of the 49ers and George Armstrong Custer, the Old West has been America's most potent source of legend. But it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction. Did you know, for example, that Annie Oakley was a talented marksman who shot an estimated 40,000 rounds per year while practicing and performing for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the late l800s? Or that many interpreters believe that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not just a fairy tale, but also a Populist allegory? These are just two of the folk legends dissected and examined in this veritable cultural geography. The volume covers everything from billionaire Howard Hughes and composer Aaron Copeland to Aztlan (the legendary first city of the Aztecs) and Area 51, the top-secret U.S. Air Force base at Groom Lake, Nevada, that has fascinated UFO and conspiracy buffs.

Myths America Lives By

Myths America Lives By PDF Author: Richard T. Hughes
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050800
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Six myths lie at the heart of the American experience. Taken as aspirational, four of those myths remind us of our noblest ideals, challenging us to realize our nation's promise while galvanizing the sense of hope and unity we need to reach our goals. Misused, these myths allow for illusions of innocence that fly in the face of white supremacy, the primal American myth that stands at the heart of all the others.

The Myths That Made America

The Myths That Made America PDF Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839414857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

Mr. West

Mr. West PDF Author: Sarah Blake
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819575186
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

The Pioneers

The Pioneers PDF Author: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501168681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that’s “as resonant today as ever” (The Wall Street Journal)—the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would define our country. As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River. McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them. Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.

Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Indo-European Poetry and Myth PDF Author: M. L. West
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191565407
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient, Indo-European heritage in the Greek material. Topics covered include the status of poets and poetry in Indo-European societies; metre, style, and diction; gods and other supernatural beings, from Father Sky and Mother Earth to the Sun-god and his beautiful daughter, the Thunder-god and other elemental deities, and earthly orders such as Nymphs and Elves; the forms of hymns, prayers, and incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative.

Virgin Land

Virgin Land PDF Author: Henry Nash Smith
Publisher: Cambridge : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer--in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizesthe imaginative expression of Westernmyths and symbols in literature withtheir role in contemporary politics,economics, and society, embodiedin such forms as the idea of ManifestDestiny, the conflict in the Americanmind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progressand civilization on the other, theHomestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War. The myths of the American Westthat found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remaina part of every American's heritage,and Smith, with his insightinto their power and significance,makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.

Red Lodge and the Mythic West

Red Lodge and the Mythic West PDF Author: Bonnie Christensen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
"Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present, Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical forces to show how national and regional influences have contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western" images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation became part of the identity that defined one town."--BOOK JACKET.