The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture

Front Cover
Frank Christianson
University of Oklahoma Press, Dec 4, 2017 - History - 264 pages

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.
 
 

Contents

List of Illustrations
Americanization Theses
The Wild West
Oscar Wilde Buffalo Bill and
Theodore
Annie Oakley and the New Girl
Annie Oakley and the Rise of Natural Womanhood
The Masculine Visual Culture
Buffalo Bills Indians in
The Black Legend of Buffalo Bill in Barcelona
A Fascist
The Special Relationship in Popular CultureThe
Bibliography
Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2017)

Frank Christianson is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean in the College of Humanities, Brigham Young University. He is editor of The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill and The Wild West in England.