Item Detail
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11961
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0
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0
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English
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Asserting Americaness : Race, Religion, and Nationalism in the Turn-of-the-Century American West
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Buffalo, New York
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State University of New York at Buffalo
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Ph.D. diss.
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'This dissertation takes as its starting point the question of how hegemonic cultural forces form ideological consensus among a nation's citizens and then seeks to understand how citizens outside the structural boundaries of an 'official'national culture selectively embrace hegemonic narratives to secure their inclusion in the social and political workings of the nation. Specifically, this dissertation discerns the ways that narratives of the American West defined national culture around the turn of the twentieth century and explores the narratives of those westerners presumed outside of its rhetoric, specifically African Americans, Mormons, and Native Americans. Many of these marginalized westerners reappropriated the terms of a larger nationalist rhetoric to advocate for their inclusion within the nation and the West, a region that paradigmatically embodied the American ethos. Through an analysis of Theodore Roosevelt's campaign in Cuba with the Rough Riders, this dissertation asserts that figures such as Roosevelt encouraged the construction of a national, 'official'culture centered on Western ideals. The concurrent work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who locates American social genesis in the West, provided the intellectual justification for Roosevelt's design. The chapters that follow address the fictions and autobiographical texts of African-American westerners, Mormons, and Native Americans, particularly those employed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West. These writers embraced various narratives of the American West--from illustrations of homesteading self-sufficiency to the reenactment of massacres--to establish their place in an American narrative centered on westward expansion. African Americans such as Oscar Micheaux espoused agrarian independence through the western ideal of 'free land,'while Mormon authors rewrote their history to exchange their image as a 'peculiar people'with the well-known narrative of western pioneers. In a most ironic appropriation of western mythology, Native Americans who joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West played roles that demanded they present themselves as exotic, savage, and, ultimately, dead, even as their employment aided in their assimilation and provided an alternative to reservation life. All of these authors sought inclusion in the cultural body of the nation by asserting their connection to western identity. As this construction of American culture was never designed for these outsiders, their writings display a division between their imagined place in the narrative of the nation and their effacement within the real West marked by intolerance and inequality.' (author's abstract)