The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture (Volume 4) (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of the United States. __The Popular Frontier__ is the first collection of essays to explore the transnational impact and mass-cultural appeal of Cody’s Wild West. As editor Frank Christianson explains in his introduction, for the first four years after Cody conceived it, the Wild West exhibition toured the United States, honing the operation into a financially solvent enterprise. When the troupe ventured to England for its first overseas booking, its success exceeded all expectations. Between 1887 and 1906 the Wild West performed in fourteen countries, traveled more than 200,000 miles, and attracted a collective audience in the tens of millions. How did Europeans respond to Cody’s vision of the American frontier? And how did European countries appropriate what they saw on display? Addressing these questions and others, the contributors to this volume consider how the Wild West functioned within social and cultural contexts far grander in scope than even the vast American West. Among the topics addressed are the pairing of William F. Cody and Theodore Roosevelt as embodiments of frontier masculinity, and the significance of the show’s most enduring persona, Annie Oakley. An informative and thought-provoking examination of the Wild West’s foreign tours, __The Popular Frontier__ offers new insight into late-nineteenth-century gender politics and ethnicity, the development of American nationalism, and the simultaneous rise of a global mass culture. Présentation de l'éditeur: "When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill's Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of the United States. The Popular Frontier is the first collection of essays to explore the transnational impact and mass-cultural appeal of Cody's Wild West. As editor Frank Christianson explains in his introduction, for the first four years after Cody conceived it, the Wild West exhibition toured the United States, honing the operation into a financially solvent enterprise. When the troupe ventured to England for its first overseas booking, its success exceeded all expectations. Between 1887 and 1906 the Wild West performed in fourteen countries, traveled more than 200,000 miles, and attracted a collective audience in the tens of millions. How did Europeans respond to Cody's vision of the American frontier? And how did European countries appropriate what they saw on display? Addressing these questions and others, the contributors to this volume consider how the Wild West functioned within social and cultural contexts far grander in scope than even the vast American West. Among the topics addressed are the pairing of William F. Cody and Theodore Roosevelt as embodiments of frontier masculinity, and the significance of the show's most enduring persona, Annie Oakley. An informative and thought-provoking examination of the Wild West's foreign tours, The Popular Frontier offers new insight into late-nineteenth-century gender politics and ethnicity, the development of American nationalism, and the simultaneous rise of a global mass culture." Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Series Editors’ Foreword 10 Prologue: Exceptionalism, Globalism, and Transnationalism: The West, America, and the World across the Centuries 14 Introduction: Americanization Theses 24 1. “It Looks like Peace in the Indian Country”: The Wild West, the Great Far East, and the Transatlantic Optics of Peace 36 2. “Not National Merely”: Oscar Wilde, Buffalo Bill, and the Performance of National Identity 54 3. “The Wild West Side of American Existence”: Theodore Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, and American Military Exceptionalism 84 4. “Don’t Forget This”: Annie Oakley and the “New Girl” in Anglo-American Culture 107 5. Annie Oakley and the Rise of Natural Womanhood in England 121 6. Taming a “Savage” Paris: The Masculine Visual Culture of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and France as a New American Frontier 140 7. “Painting the Town Red”: Buffalo Bill’s Indians in the German Media 166 8. The “Black Legend” of Buffalo Bill in Barcelona 186 9. “Buffalo Bill, the Italian Hero of the Prairies”: A Fascist Twist on Americanization in Italy 210 Epilogue: The Special Relationship in Popular Culture—The Legacy of 1887 228 Frank Christianson Bibliography 236 List of Contributors 256 Index 260 "In 1887 William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill's Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of the United States. This collection of essays explores the transnational impact and mass-cultural appeal of Cody's Wild West"-- Provided by publisher