HIST 241 The American West in Film and Reality
In director John Ford’s classic film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor utters “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes a fact print the legend.” From the colonial period through the twentieth century, the “West” and its legends have loomed large in American imagination. Legend and reality blurred in traveler’s accounts, novels, paintings, and photography. Films have continued this long tradition of inventing the West as a region of dichotomies and contradictions: a place of outlaws and heroes, a wasteland and a utopia, a landscape of America’s dreams and nightmares. During this class we will consider these themes in the light of recent work by historians. We will explore not simply what really happened, but why it matters how we tell the stories. This course considers the West as broadly defined in geography and landscape, from the deciduous forests of the first American West to twentieth-century cities on the Pacific Coast.