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Mario Van Peebles in Outlaw Posse.

How a Century of Black Westerns Shaped Movie History

Mario Van Peebles' "Outlaw Posse" is the latest attempt to correct the erasure of people of color from the classic cinema genre.
by Chris Klimek via Smithsonian on March 1, 2024
Movie poster for "Bad Day at Black Rock."

Buried in the Sand

On John Sturges’s “Bad Day at Black Rock” and Japanese America.
by Jonathan van Harmelen via Los Angeles Review of Books on July 27, 2023
Chuck Norris as Sergeant Cordell Walker in Walker: Texas Ranger.

Walkers and Lone Rangers: How Pop Culture Shaped the Texas Rangers Mythology

Texas’s elite police force has long played the hero in film and television, although the reality is far more complex.
by Sean O'Neal via Texas Monthly on November 16, 2022

Why It’s Time To Retire The Whitewashed Western

The original cowboys were actually Indigenous, Black and Latinx, but that's not what Hollywood has generally led us to believe.
by Inez Franco via BESE on October 24, 2019

How Spaghetti Westerns Shaped Modern Cinema

In the realism, the set pieces, the operatic music, Sergio Leone was pointing the way towards modern filmmaking.
by Quentin Tarantino via The Spectator on June 1, 2019

How John Wayne Became a Hollow Masculine Icon

The actor’s persona was inextricable from the toxic culture of Cold War machismo.
by Stephen Metcalf via The Atlantic on November 9, 2017
Sam Peckinpah looks into a film camera.

The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah

“Bloody Sam” was born one hundred years ago this month.
by Christopher Sandford via Modern Age on February 19, 2025
A screenshot from "Red Dead Redemption 2" of cowboy protagonist Arthur Morgan riding a horse in a western landscape.

What Red Dead Redemption II Reveals About Our Myths of the American West

On the making of a centuries-old obsession at the heart of American national identity.
by Tore C. Olsson via Literary Hub on August 28, 2024
A man wearing a cowboy outfit shoots at a series of targets in a sand pit

Home on the (Firing) Range: Gunfight Reenactments, “Old West” Competitive Shooting, and the Myth of Authenticity

Reenactments of the frontier west, complete with cowboy shootouts on main streets, reproduce a narrative of history that is widely accepted by millions.
by Jennifer Tucker via The Panorama on November 15, 2023
Collage of American Indian film characters.

Native Americans on the Silver Screen, From Wild West Shows to 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

How American Indians in Hollywood have gone from stereotypes to starring roles.
by Sandra Hale Schulman via Smithsonian on October 12, 2023

Long Before Daniel Penny Killed Jordan Neely, There Was 'Death Wish'

Defenses of the recent killing of Jordan Neely suggest that the film’s reactionary, Wild West–style vigilante violence still holds the imagination of many.
by Eileen Jones via Jacobin on May 27, 2023
Premiere of The Gaucho at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, November 4, 1927.

The Gaucho Western

When Hollywood went down Argentine way.
by Federico Perelmuter via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 23, 2023
Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
by Jeanna Kadlec via Longreads on April 1, 2021
A black and white picture of Clint Eastwood

Cowboy Confederates

The ideals of the Confederate South found new force in the bloody plains of the American West.
by Jefferson Cowie via Dissent on November 1, 2020
Book cover of "Ride the Devil's Herd," featuring a mustachioed man wearing a hat

Wyatt Earp Does Not Rest in Peace

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.
by Allen Barra via Los Angeles Review of Books on August 19, 2020

The Wild West Meets the Southern Border

At first glance, frontier towns near the U.S.-Mexico border seem oblivious both of history and of the current political reality.
by Valeria Luiselli via The New Yorker on June 3, 2019

Mange, Morphine, and Deadly Disease: Medicine and Public Health in Red Dead Redemption 2

The video game offers a realistic portrayal of illness and public health in the 19th-century American West.
by Leah Richier via Nursing Clio on March 12, 2019
Pinkerton detectives.

Who Were the Pinkertons?

A video game portrays the Wild West’s famous detective agency as violent enforcers of order. But the modern-day company disagrees.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on February 1, 2019

Two Ways of Looking at the Bisbee Deportation

A century-old image and the film it inspired.
by Katherine Benton-Cohen, Robert Greene via Lapham’s Quarterly on August 30, 2018

You’ll Never See The Northern Lights

"Blade Runner: 2049" portrays a world that is both more terrifying and duller than the world of the franchise's original.
by Aaron Bady via The New Inquiry on October 8, 2017
Iron Eyes Cody meets Jimmy Carter, who is wearing a Native American headdress

Among the Tribe of the Wannabes

A closer look at non-Native Americans that appropriate, fabricate, and invent Native identities for themselves.
by Russell Cobb via This Land Press on August 26, 2014
Drawing of cowboys riding in the desert, guns drawn, while a herd grazes.

The Hell We Raised: How Texas Shaped the Gunfighter Era

Texans left an enduring mark on the gunfighter era. The frontier was a darker place because of it.
by Bryan Burrough via Texas Monthly on May 5, 2025
A group of people riding horses on a dude ranch.

The Rise and Resilience of Dude Ranches

Dude ranches have been a popular American vacation spot for more than one hundred years.
by Teresa Bitler via The Saturday Evening Post on February 3, 2025
Collage of different Indigenous people from the present day.
partner

Native Narratives: The Representation of Native Americans in Public Broadcasting

A selection of radio and television programs that reinforce or reject stereotypes, and Native-created media that responds to those depictions.
by Sally Smith via American Archive of Public Broadcasting on November 16, 2024
Marlon Brando on the set of 'One-Eyed Jacks,' 1961.

Brando Unmatched

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.
by Giancarlo Sopo via The Dispatch on April 27, 2024
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of "Killers of the Flower Moon."

How Publicity of Killers of the Flower Moon Recalls Rosebud Yellow Robe’s 1950 Hollywood Tour

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.
by Paul Morton via Literary Hub on November 20, 2023
original

Oregon Trails

After navigating a minor hiccup in our own provisioning process, we set out for the West on what would be our longest trip yet.
by Ed Ayers on October 24, 2023
Statue of the "Spirit of Wyoming," a bucking horse with its rider, outside of the Capitol Building in Cheyenne.
partner

The Fight for Accurate Western History is about Inclusion Today

Distortions in Western history have long obscured the region’s Black communities.
by Anthony W. Wood via Made By History on February 2, 2023
Comedian Charlie Hill on stage with a microphone.

‘Part of Why We Survived’

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?
by Ian Frazier via New York Review of Books on December 23, 2021
Unaccompanied children in a train station

Novel Transport

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.
by Kristen Martin via Lapham’s Quarterly on November 1, 2021
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