Sixguns and Society

Sixguns and Society
Author: Will Wright
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520340787

From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly—as I often did—that you are doing research in social science. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977. From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consc

Sixguns and Society

Sixguns and Society
Author: Will Wright
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1977-09-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780520034914

The purpose of this book is to explain the popularity of the Western film. The author, Sociologist Will Wright, studied the top-grossing western films from 1930 to 1972 and as a result of his analysis shows how the plots have changed correspondingly to the changes in American society. Applying structural analysis to Western plots, Wright distinguishes four historical periods of the sound Western: the classical plot, the transition theme, the vengeance variation and the professional plot. This book contains an appendix, bibliography, and an index.

Six Guns and Society

Six Guns and Society
Author: Will Wright
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1975
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780520027534

Six-Gun Snow White

Six-Gun Snow White
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2015-11-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1481444743

A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West. Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story…at once familiar and entirely new.

The Wild West

The Wild West
Author: Will Wright
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2001-08-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780761952336

Will Wright explores the continuing popularity of the myth of the Wild West, demonstrating how, as a cultural icon, it speaks deeply to a desire for individualism and liberty. The author discusses the myth through market and social theory.

Six Gun Sound

Six Gun Sound
Author: Sven Crongeyer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781933502007

This account of the struggle to bring law and order to a city rich with gold rush money, at odds with Mexican bandits, and teeming with forty-niners and confederate sympathizers chronicles the chaotic early days of Los Angeles, which boasted the highest homicide rate in America by 1850. From profiles of the frontier-style lawmen hired to stop the initial mayhem to an analysis of the city's modern sheriff's office -- the largest in America -- this book draws comparisons between the uproar of the early days, the racial tensions that erupted during the Watts riots, and the safety issues that preoccupy the police force today.

Arming and Disarming

Arming and Disarming
Author: R. Blake Brown
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2012-10-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1442665602

From the École Polytechnique shootings of 1989 to the political controversy surrounding the elimination of the federal long-gun registry, the issue of gun control has been a subject of fierce debate in Canada. But in fact, firearm regulation has been a sharply contested issue in the country since Confederation. Arming and Disarming offers the first comprehensive history of gun control in Canada from the colonial period to the present. In this sweeping, immersive book, R. Blake Brown outlines efforts to regulate the use of guns by young people, punish the misuse of arms, impose licensing regimes, and create firearm registries. Brown also challenges many popular assumptions about Canadian history, suggesting that gun ownership was far from universal during much of the colonial period, and that many nineteenth century lawyers – including John A. Macdonald – believed in a limited right to bear arms. Arming and Disarming provides a careful exploration of how social, economic, cultural, legal, and constitutional concerns shaped gun legislation and its implementation, as well as how these factors defined Canada’s historical and contemporary ‘gun culture.’

Guns in the Hands of Artists

Guns in the Hands of Artists
Author: Jonathan Ferrara
Publisher: Inkshares
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 194175872X

In the 1990s, the New Orleans murder rate exploded. In 1996, 350 people were killed—the highest number in the city’s history, and the highest rate in the nation. In response to this crisis, gallery owner and artist Jonathan Ferrara and artist Brian Borrello, launched a powerful project: Guns in the Hands of Artists. Over sixty artists, including painters, glass artists, sculptors, photographers, and poets, used decommissioned guns taken off the city streets via a gun buyback program to express a thought, make a statement, open a discussion, and to stimulate thinking about guns and gun violence in America. As gun violence continues to devastate the nation on a daily basis, Guns in the Hands of Artists reemerged in 2012 as a community-based social activist art project that has since traveled to six cities across the US. Using art as a mirror for life and interweaving the works of thirty diverse artists with the voices of seventeen national thought leaders, this book is an important outgrowth of the exhibition and an extension of its efforts to employ art as a vehicle for dialogue, as a call to action, and—ultimately—as an agent of change. Essays by: Walter Isaacson, Senator Tim Kaine, Lupe Fiasco, Richard Ford, Joe Nocera, Trymaine Lee, Lolis Eric Elie, John M. Barry, Dan Cameron, Lucia McBath, Harry Shearer, Jonathan Ferrara, Brian Borrello, Maria Cuomo Cole, Michael Waldman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Captain Mark Kelly.

Gun, With Occasional Music

Gun, With Occasional Music
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1995-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312858780

Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.

Guns and Violence

Guns and Violence
Author: Joyce Lee Malcolm
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674040472

Behind the passionate debate over gun control and armed crime lurk assumptions about the link between guns and violence. Indeed, the belief that more guns in private hands means higher rates of armed crime underlies most modern gun control legislation. But are these assumptions valid? Investigating the complex and controversial issue of the real relationship between guns and violence, Joyce Lee Malcolm presents an incisive, thoroughly researched historical study of England, whose strict gun laws and low rates of violent crime are often cited as proof that gun control works. To place the private ownership of guns in context, Malcolm offers a wide-ranging examination of English society from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, analyzing changing attitudes toward crime and punishment, the impact of war, economic shifts, and contrasting legal codes on violence. She looks at the level of armed crime in England before its modern restrictive gun legislation, the limitations that gun laws have imposed, and whether those measures have succeeded in reducing the rate of armed crime. Malcolm also offers a revealing comparison of the experience in England experience with that in the modern United States. Today Americans own some 200 million guns and have seen eight consecutive years of declining violence, while the English--prohibited from carrying weapons and limited in their right to self-defense have suffered a dramatic increase in rates of violent crime. This timely and thought-provoking book takes a crucial step in illuminating the actual relationship between guns and violence in modern society.