Examines the ways in which the frontier myth influences American culture and politics, drawing on fiction, western films, and political writing.

Originally published: New York : Atheneum ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

Introduction: the significance of the frontier myth in American history -- pt. 1. The mythology of progressivism, 1880-1902 -- The winning of the West : Theodore Roosevelt's frontier thesis, 1880-1900 -- The White City and the Wild West: Buffalo Bill and the mythic space of American history, 1880-1917 -- Mob, tribe, and regiment : modernization as militarization, 1883-1902 -- pt. 2. Populists and progressives : literacy myth and idealogical style, 1872-1940 -- Mythologies of resistance : outlaws, detectives, and dime-novel populism, 1873-1903 -- Aristocracy of violence : virility, vigilante politics, and red-blooded fiction, 1895-1910 -- From the open range to the mean streets : myth and formula fiction, 1910-1940 -- pt. 3. Colonizing a mythic landscape : movie Westerns, 1903-1948 -- Formulas on film : myth and genre in the silent movie, 1903-1926 -- The studio system, the Depression, and the eclipse of the Western, 1930-1938 -- The Western is American history, 1939-1941 -- Last stands and lost patrols : the Western and the war film, 1940-1948. pt. 4. Democracy and force : the Western and the Cold War, 1946-1960 -- Studies in red and white : calvary, Indians and Cold War ideology, 1946-1954 -- Killer elite : the cult of the gunfighter, 1950-1953 -- Imagining Third World revolutions : the "Zapata problem" and the counterinsurgency scenario, 1952-1954 -- Gunfighters and Green Berets : imagining the counterinsurgency warrior, 1956-1960 -- pt. 5. Gunfighter nation : myth, ideology, and violence on the New Frontier, 1960-1970 -- Conquering New Frontiers : John Kennedy, John Wayne, and the myth of heroic leadership, 1960-1968 -- Attrition : the big unit war, the riots, and the counterinsurgency Western, 1965-1968 -- Cross-over point : the Mylai massacre, the Wild Bunch, and the demoralization of America, 1969-1972 -- Conclusion: the crisis of public myth.