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Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History | 
 enlarge | Author: Joy S. Kasson
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
Buy New: $27.00
New (17) Used (14) from $7.49
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 810539
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0809032449
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780809032440
ASIN: 0809032449
Publication Date: October 17, 2001
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
A fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment
Canada, and Europe. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure.
Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity" yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition.
But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.
Book Description
A century ago, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show enthralled millions of spectators in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure. Joy S. Kasson's important book shows how Cody's image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity," yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of American tradition.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Tedious and Redundant December 3, 2002
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was stunned by how a subject such as the Wild West shows could be presented in such a tiresome manner. The author makes the same two or three points over and over again (the meat of her book) and spends the rest of the book detailing lithographs and program covers -- copies of which appear in the book. I stuck with it to the end, but was frustrated by it being a bad read and a waste of time.
 Buffalo Bill was a Major Stud Dude December 11, 2000
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is an outstanding scholarly study of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show. Kasson deals with her subject sympathetically and never leaps to politically correct judgments. Kasson not only offers a biography of Buffalo Bill and a study of the cultural meaning of his Wild West, but also a study of how Indians and other marginalized groups figured in the Wild West show. Excellent book. Buy it.
A solid must-have September 4, 2000
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
After checking this book out of the library and reading some of it, we knew we had to own it. Kasson writes well for the serious amateur of the Wild West, and the scholarship appears solid. It's clearly a work of contemporary history-writing, in that Kasson is very attentive to how we re-tell our past to ourselves, how myths and celebrity develop. In this respect it resembles Paul Reddin's "Wild West Shows" (University of Illinois Press, 1999), which we also recommend. Readers who want to know what it was REALLY like on the plains will want to consult other books.
An important analysis of America's first celebrity July 11, 2000
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Joy Kasson uses the story of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show to tell us about the beginnings of celebrity in America. Tracing Buffalo Bill's life from Army scout through Wild West show impresario she reveals how Cody "created an American memory through entertainment" by bringing together Northerners and former Confederates in the final decade of the nineteenth century for a shared and comforting interpretation of American identity. The imperialist story the Wild West Show told was legitimizing to American's who wanted to view their destruction of native American life in their westward advancement as the justifiable acts by victims of murderous natives, now happily tamed as actors, rather than the other way around. She demonstrates how Buffalo Bill's thesis about western conquest by white Americans influenced the twentieth century interpretation of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the Boy Scouts, and particulary through the powerful genre of the motion picture, in which Cody's influence was seminal. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show promoters were among the first to manipulate the public through advertising and image building. Kasson has given new insight into a late twentieth century culture that produced such phenomena as an actor as president, spin doctors and focus groups, and in countless other ways blurred the line between performance and reality. A book both scholarly and readable, Buffalo Bill's Wild West has broken new ground in our understanding of the beginnings of our celebrity culture.
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