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by Peter G. Boag
Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile.
But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing―for both men and women―was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century―when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category―Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.
"This is fascinating stuff, on many levels... . If you're a western history buff especially, you need to outfit yourself with this book soon." ―Inland Empire Weekly
"A extremely valuable work." ―Pacific Northwest Quarterly
"A lovely (and at times wry) new volume." ―Western Historical Qtly
This information about Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Boag holds the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He is the author of Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon and Same Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, both from UC Press.
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