0
Your cart

Your cart is empty

Books > History > American history

Buy Now

The Gunfighters - How Texas Made the West Wild (Hardcover) Loot Price: R731
Discovery Miles 7 310
You Save: R156 (18%)
The Gunfighters - How Texas Made the West Wild (Hardcover): Bryan Burrough

The Gunfighters - How Texas Made the West Wild (Hardcover)

Bryan Burrough

 (sign in to rate)
List price R887 Loot Price R731 Discovery Miles 7 310 | Repayment Terms: R69 pm x 12* You Save R156 (18%)

Bookmark and Share

Expected to ship within 18 - 22 working days

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It’s never stopped.

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

General

Imprint: Penguin Press
Release date: June 2025
Authors: Bryan Burrough
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 978-1-984878-90-8
Categories: Books > Humanities > History > American history > General
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Crime & criminology > General
Books > History > American history > General
Promotions
LSN: 1-984878-90-5
Barcode: 9781984878908

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!

You might also like..

A Promised Land
Barack Obama Hardcover  (6)
R930 R795 Discovery Miles 7 950
The Mother Of Black Hollywood - A Memoir
Jenifer Lewis Paperback R405 R356 Discovery Miles 3 560
Hidden Figures - The Untold Story of the…
Margot Lee Shetterly Paperback  (2)
R337 R306 Discovery Miles 3 060
Call Sign Chaos - Learning To Lead
Jim Mattis, Bing West Hardcover  (1)
R621 R532 Discovery Miles 5 320
Humans Of New York
Brandon Stanton Hardcover  (3)
R868 R665 Discovery Miles 6 650
Law in American History, Volume III…
G. Edward White Hardcover R1,617 Discovery Miles 16 170
Rethinking American Grand Strategy
Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, … Hardcover R2,612 Discovery Miles 26 120
Outside In - The Transnational Circuitry…
Andrew Preston, Doug Rossinow Hardcover R3,990 Discovery Miles 39 900
The History of Venezuela, 2nd Edition
H Micheal Tarver Hardcover R2,210 Discovery Miles 22 100
Moral Minorities and the Making of…
Kyle G Volk Hardcover R1,472 Discovery Miles 14 720
The Enlightenment on Trial - Ordinary…
Bianca Premo Hardcover R3,808 Discovery Miles 38 080
Writing the Rebellion - Loyalists and…
Philip Gould Hardcover R2,009 Discovery Miles 20 090

See more

Partners