Christine Bold

From Hollywood films to novels by Louis L'Amour and television series like Gunsmoke and Deadwood, the Wild West has exerted a powerful hold on the cultural imagination of the United States. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt's founding of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, Christine Bold traces the origins and evolution of the western genre, revealing how a group of prominent eastern aristocrats-a cadre she terms "the frontier club" -created and propagated the myth of the Wild West to advance their own self-interest as well as larger systems of privilege and exclusion. Mining institutional archives, personal papers, novels, and films, The Frontier Club excavates the hidden social, political, and financial interests behind the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier-club fiction, most notably Owen Wister's bestseller The Virginian, in relation to federal policies and cultural spaces (from exclusive gentlemen's clubs to national parks to zoos); it casts new light on key clubmen, both the famous and the forgotten-figures such as Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Frederic Remington-while recovering the women on whom these men depended and without whom this version of the popular West would not exist; and it considers the costs of the frontier-club formula, in terms of its impact on Indigenous peoples and its marginalization of other popular voices, including western writings by African Americans, women, and working-class white men. An engaging cultural history that covers print culture, big-game hunting, politics, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, and environmental conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, The Frontier Club provides a welcome new perspective on the enduring American myth of the Wild West.

Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924

The Frontier Club

Uncovering hidden histories of Indigenous performers in vaudeville and in the creation of western modernity and popular culture

"Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Progression in Primary Design and Technology

Joad Raymond

Gary Kelly

"Devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present."--Provided by publisher.

Volume Six: US Popular Print Culture 1860-1920

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Serving as an introduction to narrative methods and narrative analysis, Christine Bold's new book provides students, researchers, and other professionals with an introduction to the theory and practice of narrative approaches in research. This book does everything that a methods book needs to do. It is practical, yet sets out the theory and history behind the approach, and it looks explicitly at design, ethics, data gathering, data analysis and writing as an ongoing process of narrative research. Bold's text deals comprehensively with conceptual issues within narrative research and is driven throughout by a range of real research specific examples of narrative analysis in action.

Using Narrative in Research

Supporting Teaching and Learning brings together theoretical perspectives, practical educational ideas and current academic debates to help students develop their knowledge and understanding of core educational issues.

Supporting Learning and Teaching

In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of one unit, the Federal Writers Project, was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States. The WPA arts projects were poised on the cusp of the modern bureaucratization of culture. They occurred at a moment when the federal government was extending its reach into citizens' daily lives. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. Clumped together, they manifest a lofty role for the project and a heavy responsibility for its teams of writers. The guides assumed the authority of conceptualizing the national identity. In The WPA Guides: Mapping America Christine Bold closely examines this publicized view of the guides and reveals its flaws. Her research in archival materials reveals the negotiations and conflicts between the central editors in Washington and the local people in the states. Race, region, and gender are taken as important categories within which difference and conflict appear. She looks at the guidebook for each of five distinctively different locations -- Idaho, New York City, North Carolina, Missouri, and U.S. One and the Oregon Trail--to assess the editorial plotting of such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As regionalists jostled with federal officialdom, the faultlines of the project gaped open. Spotlighting the controversies between federal and state bureaucracies, Bold concludes that the image of America that the WPA fostered is closer to fabrication than to actuality. Christine Bold is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

Mapping America

The WPA Guides

The Works Progress Administration housed America's largest arts funding program, part of the New Deal's foray into nationwide work relief. The Massachusetts writers' project put a range of blue-collar workers to work as government writers. This work probes the Massachusetts experience.

Christine Bold

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