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Frontiers of Boyhood - Imagining America, Past and Future (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,163
Discovery Miles 11 630
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Frontiers of Boyhood - Imagining America, Past and Future (Hardcover)
Series: William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, ""Go West,
young man, and grow up with the country,"" the frontier was already
synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American
masculinity. But Greeley's exhortation also captured popular
sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many
educators, politicians, and parents, raising boys right seemed a
pivotal step in securing the growing nation's future. This book
revisits these narratives of American boyhood and frontier
mythology to show how they worked against and through one another -
and how this interaction shaped ideas about national character,
identity, and progress. The intersection of ideas about boyhood and
the frontier, while complex and multifaceted, was dominated by one
arresting notion: in the space of the West, boys would grow into
men and the fledgling nation would expand to fulfill its promise.
Frontiers of Boyhood explores this myth and its implications and
ramifications through western history, childhood studies, and a
rich cultural archive. Detailing surprising intersections between
American frontier mythology and historical notions of child
development, the book offers a new perspective on William ""Buffalo
Bill"" Cody's influence on children and childhood; on the
phenomenon of ""American Boy Books""; the agency of child
performers, differentiated by race and gender, in Wild West
exhibitions; and the cultural work of boys' play, as witnessed in
scouting organizations and the deployment of mass-produced toys.
These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through
a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific
theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of
how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier
have worked together to produce compelling stories about the
nation's past and its imagined future.
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