Midway between Billings, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park, tourists encounter the quaint little town of Red Lodge. Here one may see cowboys, Indians, and mountain men roaming a downtown that's on the National Register of Historic Places, attend a rodeo on the 4th of July, or join in a celebration of immigrants during the annual "Festival of Nations." One would hardly guess that until recently Red Lodge was really a down-and-out coal-mining town or that it was populated mainly by white Americans.
In many ways, Red Lodge is typical of western towns that have created new interpretations of their pasts in order to attract tourists through a mix of public pageants and old-timey facades. In The Evolving West, Montana-born Bonnie Christensen tells how Red Lodge reinvented itself and shows that the "history" a community chooses to celebrate may be only loosely based on what actually happened in the town's past.
Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present, Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical forces to show how national and regional influences have contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western" images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation became part of the identity that defined one town.
Christensen takes us behind the main street facades of Red Lodge to tell a story of salesmanship, adaptation, and survival. Combining oral histories, newspapers, government records, and even minutes of organization meetings, she shows not only how people have used different interpretations of the past to create a sense of themselves in the present, but also how public memory is created and re-created.
Christensen's shrewd analysis transcends one place to illuminate broader trends in the region and offer a clearer understanding of the motivations behind the creation of "theme towns" throughout America. By explaining how and why we choose various versions of the past to fit who we want to be—and who we want others to think we are—she helps us learn more about the role of myths and myth-making in American communities, and in the process learn a little more about ourselves.
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Gayle , Margot , and Edmund V. Gillon Jr. Cast - Iron Architecture in New York . New York : Dover Publications , 1974 . Geisst , Charles R. Wall Street : A History . New York : Oxford University Press , 1997 . Gibson , Charles Dana .
Features Nonportable material remains such as building foundations , wells , graves , and landscaping elements are referred to as features . Archaeologists give special attention to features because they are so highly informative about ...
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One later law did return to the theme of interracial sex and , in doing so , projected and interlinked concerns about the perceived vulnerability of white females and the imagined predatory nature of black males .
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"The Grand Excursion of 1854 celebrated the opportunities created when the railroad reached the banks of the Upper Mississippi River. Curtis and Elizabeth Roseman remind us of this significant connection and how it has influenced, ...
Journal of a Visit to the Georgia Islands is a record of that trip, and although unsigned, internal evidence points directly to prominent Georgia entrepreneur Jonathan Bryan (1708-1788) as the author.
1986年洛杉磯中央圖書館,疑似遭到縱火,100萬本藏書付之一炬,是史上最嚴重的圖書館火災之一,且懸案至今未破。三十多年後,《紐約客》知名記者和《紐約時報》暢銷書作家蘇 ...