Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

there probably isn't a better book out there on cody. and if you're interested in him, a book you nmight not find through usual searches if "Eiffel's Tower" which covers the 1889 world exposition in paris, where thomas edison, cody, whistler, and half the famous french painters of the day were in attendance. cody, of course, entertained hundreds of thousands of visitors to two shows a day and was the toast of parisian society...

I like these book whille it shows a life of a wild west hero from other side of curtain. The bookexplain how the shows began to be first step to advertise a bright spectrum of avdience not only in USA but also in Europe.Poor or rich they like the shows.

Easy & fun to read while being full of history. Kasson makes learning about BB engaging & interesting. I highly recommend this.

Definitely a must-add to any collection you might have about Buffalo Bill. Really a great book.

Excellent!

Love the book!

Joy Kasson uses the story of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show to tell us about the beginnings of celebrity in America. Tracing Buffalo Bill's life from Army scout through Wild West show impresario she reveals how Cody "created an American memory through entertainment" by bringing together Northerners and former Confederates in the final decade of the nineteenth century for a shared and comforting interpretation of American identity. The imperialist story the Wild West Show told was legitimizing to American's who wanted to view their destruction of native American life in their westward advancement as the justifiable acts by victims of murderous natives, now happily tamed as actors, rather than the other way around. She demonstrates how Buffalo Bill's thesis about western conquest by white Americans influenced the twentieth century interpretation of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the Boy Scouts, and particulary through the powerful genre of the motion picture, in which Cody's influence was seminal.Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show promoters were among the first to manipulate the public through advertising and image building. Kasson has given new insight into a late twentieth century culture that produced such phenomena as an actor as president, spin doctors and focus groups, and in countless other ways blurred the line between performance and reality.A book both scholarly and readable, Buffalo Bill's Wild West has broken new ground in our understanding of the beginnings of our celebrity culture.

This is an outstanding scholarly study of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show. Kasson deals with her subject sympathetically and never leaps to politically correct judgments. Kasson not only offers a biography of Buffalo Bill and a study of the cultural meaning of his Wild West, but also a study of how Indians and other marginalized groups figured in the Wild West show. Excellent book. Buy it.