Beginning in 1890, Americans exported specific ideas and images of the American West to Italy. Transnational exchanges of ideas, people, and culture help explain how Italians have adapted western ...mythology to accommodate their cultural, political, and economic circumstances, keeping the American West relevant to them in the twenty-first century.
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In the 1830s, US artist and traveller George Catlin (1796-1872) amassed what he called an 'Indian Gallery', which he then toured in Europe as a means of publicizing the 'American Indian plight' as a ...so-called disappearing 'race'. The gallery included his own paintings, material objects he had collected and, eventually, live performers, some of them from indigenous North American communities who took part in performing themselves in one of the first instances of what would morph later into very popular Wild West shows like those run by Buffalo Bill Cody. Whereas previous scholarship of Catlin's spectacles has focused on the participation of native performers, I will interrogate the visual displays in conjunction with the live performances to try to unlock the British and European nineteenth-century sensibilities and curiosities that would enable such shows to become popular. The essay also investigates ways in which Catlin's displays were loosely aligned with a 'science' of ethnography that entailed examination of both peoples and their objects.
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Wild West shows, a form of spectacular exhibition that presented life on the frontier, thrived from the 1880s to the early 19005. Typically a two- to three-hour extravaganza, a Wild West show ...performance included displays of horsemanship and marksmanship, western vignettes that depicted frontier life and the heroic deeds of cowboys and settlers, Indian-themed vignettes that presented their culture and customs (e.g., setting up a village and dancing), and the reenactment of famous battles, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or, at the very least, a generic Indian attack on a settler's cabin or an immigrant wagon train. This Wild West show formula remained basically the same through the decades; however, battle reenactments were added and removed based on popularity and current events. Based on archival research conducted at several depositories, this article investigates how newspaper reports pertaining to Native performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West produced and reinforced discourses of conquest, progress, and civilization.
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