The Cowboy: Myth, Reality, and the American Frontier

Few figures are as central to the mythology of the United States as the Cowboy. While they were, in historical fact, itinerant wage laborers toiling under hazardous conditions without the protections afforded by formal association, they became in the popular imagination a cipher: of rugged individualism, American universalism, and the virtue of westward expansion—all the more so as, over time, actual cowboys’ economic utility ebbed. But was the figure of the Cowboy—still very much alive in film and television—ever meant to resemble its real, historical counterpart? What does the lasso-twirling, hat-doffing, gun-slinging desperado of the erstwhile Wild West show have to do with the political economy of the American frontier? With the expropriation and genocide of Indigenous Americans? With the internal contradictions in American liberalism—between community and private property, individualism and society, virtue and self-interest—to which westward expansion was a violent and provisory answer?

In this course, we will take the figure of the Cowboy as our lens to explore American imperialism, from Manifest Destiny to the frontiers of the Global War on Terror. We will consider, side by side, the reality of cattle drives and the rodeo as performance; the economic and industrial landscape of the western United States and the Wild West of genre film; the violent history of expansion and the dime store novels, television series, and advertising images that aimed to make it palatable. Even after a century of historical revision and widespread awareness of the genocidal character of the American imperial project, what accounts for the durability of the Cowboy in mass culture and popular consciousness?

Course Schedule

Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
October 16 — November 06, 2024
4 weeks

$335.00

This class is completed. Check out our upcoming courses.