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Book Review
Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West. Ed. by Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau. (New York: Routledge, 2001. x, 308 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 0-415-92470-7. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-415-92471-5.)
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As Joan Scott predicted in 1985, women's historians' exploration of gender has opened up terrain for scholars interested in the ways in which ideas about masculinity have shaped all kinds of histories. Such ventures are not new to the history of the American West (Henry Nash Smith's 1950 Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth comes to mind), but in recent years western historians have embraced the study of manliness with the excitement of a Montana fly fisherman fondling a brand new Orvis rod. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau have assembled here a sampler of recent work on the topic, intriguing both for what we can learn about the history of masculinity and for the ways in which familiar western chronologies and mythologies continue to shape historical scholarship. |
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