Overview

The history of the Wild West has long been fictionalized in novels, films, and television shows. Catering to these popular representations, towns across America have created tourist sites connecting such tales with historical monuments. Yet these attractions stray from known histories in favor of the embellished past visitors expect to see. In Mythic Frontiers, Daniel Maher illustrates how aggrandized versions of the past have been used to turn a profit. Examining the imagined frontier town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, Maher warns that disconnecting cultural heritage tourism from history minimizes the devastating consequences of imperialism, racism, and sexism and relegitimizes the privilege bestowed upon white men.

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9780813062532

Table of Contents

Reviews

Contributes meaningfully to the ongoing discussion of how Americans display and consume their complicated past. --Journal of Southern History Drops the 'protective cloak of heritage' from the thousands of historical sites that profit from celebrating American manifest destiny. . . . From start to finish, Maher pairs the frontier complex and reality in ways that move beyond myth busting and instead ties both to changes in national discourse and the development of the tourist economy in the West. --American Indian Quarterly A fascinating and finely detailed examination of the construction and perpetuation of . . . the frontier complex at the Fort Smith, Arkansas historic site. --Western Historical Quarterly Maher convincingly shows that elements of the frontier complex are enacted in the process of developing the interpretation of a heritage site as well as through watching western movies, playing cowboy and Indian, reenacting the past through living history events, and simply visiting a heritage site. . . . An important contribution to cultural heritage studies. --Journal of Folklore Research

Contributes meaningfully to the ongoing discussion of how Americans display and consume their complicated past. --Journal of Southern History Drops the 'protective cloak of heritage' from the thousands of historical sites that profit from celebrating American manifest destiny. . . . From start to finish, Maher pairs the frontier complex and reality in ways that move beyond myth busting and instead ties both to changes in national discourse and the development of the tourist economy in the West. --American Indian Quarterly A fascinating and finely detailed examination of the construction and perpetuation of . . . the frontier complex at the Fort Smith, Arkansas historic site. --Western Historical Quarterly

Author Information

Daniel R. Maher is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith, USA.

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