The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the ‘white’ perspective. Many studies have analysed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. In this incisive study, distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective.Buscombe op...

John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956) was voted the seventh greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound's most recent poll of critics. Its influence on many of America's most distinguished contemporary filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and John Milius, is enormous. John Wayne's portrait of the vengeful Confederate Ethan Edwards gives the film a truly epic dimension, as does his long and lonely journey into the dark heart of America. Edward Busco...

John Ford's Stagecoach, starring John Wayne in the part that made him a star, remains the most famous Western ever made. Shedding new light on an old favourite, this is an enjoyable account of how the film got made, combined with a careful scene-by-scene analysis, a wealth of illustrations and the most complete credits yet assembled.

Addresses the perennial appeal of the Western, exploring its 19th century popular culture, and its relationship to the economic structure of Hollywood. This work considers the defining features of the Western and traces its main cycles, from the epic Westerns of the 1920s and singing cowboys of the 1930s to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s.

In this work, Edward Buscombe explores the ways in which 'Unforgiven', sticking surprisingly close to the original script by David Webb Peoples, moves between the requirements of the traditional Western, with its generic conventions of revenge and male bravado, and more modern sensitivities.

Though one of the most popular genres for decades, the western started to lose its relevance in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the early 1980s it had ridden into the sunset on screens both big and small. The genre has enjoyed a resurgence, however, and in the past few decades some remarkable westerns have appeared on television and in movie theaters. From independent films to critically acclaimed Hollywood productions and television series, the western remains an important part of American po...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERWinner of the RBC Taylor PrizeFinalist for Canada ReadsFinalist for Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction**Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King’s critical examination of the history and experience of Native peoples in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since t...

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North Americ...

This lavishly illustrated volume reassesses and celebrates the life and legacy of the West’s most legendary figure, George Armstrong Custer, from Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove and “one of America’s great storytellers” (The Wall Street Journal), Larry McMurtry.On June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked a large Lakota Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. He lost not o...

In this challenging book, written as a series of open letters to an American friend, Pierre Berton reaches into his profound knowledge of the country’s history and geography to dissect, praise, explain and occasionally criticize the national character. He does so, not with abstract opinions but with apt and colourful examples taken from the past and the present: Sam Steele’s gold rush censorship of the Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse; Ontario’s grudging acceptance of beer in three Toronto ballp...

As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that we Canadians hold about ourselves. National Dreams is the story of our stories; the myths and truths of our collective past th...

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral stor...