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This chapter notes the efforts of his family to keep his memory alive, sums up the main revelations of the biography, and shows how many of Angell's strengths and weaknesses were path dependent–that is, determined by his early experiences.

This chapter discusses the role of cowboy lawmen in gun culture in the U.S. It explains that Americans have long romanticized the American West and the frontier as places that forged some of the most legendary heroes of American history. These heroes were the gun-toting cowboy lawmen. This chapter suggests that cowboy action shooting dramatizes the central theme of American mythic history: that American identity was reborn and remade through violent conflict, and it contributes to the ritual enactment to this legendary time in American history.

This chapter examines entrepreneurship and innovation as fundamental elements of American-style capitalism. It first provides a historical background on how America got to an era of cowboy capitalism before discussing how the American economy evolved after the settlement of the western frontier. The major changes moved in the direction of large industrial processes and an attitude that, among firms, bigger is better; this period is known as the managerial economy, which lasted through the 1970s. The chapter also considers why the information technology revolution happened in America and concludes with an assessment of whether the past three decades really is a new era of cowboy capitalism—a shift from the managerial economy that dominated for most of the twentieth century to a renewed entrepreneurial economy.

Disillusion with American culture became widespread during the Vietnam War as protesters condemned the immorality of the war and the military industrial establishment that supported it, and supporters of the war condemned the protesters. A sense of moral and spiritual disenchantment accompanied these culture wars, along with widespread criticism of American claims to being a nation chosen by God. In addition to describing the end of “victory culture,” and the dismantling of stereotypical distinctions between good cowboys and bad Indians, this chapter points to the important contributions made to American society by the civil rights movement. This discussion of civil rights focuses on the influence of the school of religious thought known as personalism on Martin Luther King Jr. and its linkages to long‐standing American trends of religious individualism.

This chapter describes the sport of cowboy action shooting, the gun sport that most explicitly dramatizes the narrative of American Frontier history. It explains that this sport is conducted in a venue that ostensibly gave birth to images of traditional American gender roles and forms of Frontier-oriented entertainment. It argues that cowboy action shooting presents a vision of the American Frontier in which white, middle-class good guys can create small, self-contained communities based on shared values and lifestyles. It describes cowboy shoots governed by the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS).

This chapter examines the role of “hillbilly” in commercially recorded rural white music, by the early 1930s commonly (although often disparagingly) labeled “hillbilly music”. The hillbilly image in country music was both a fabrication of music industry producers and promoters, and an outgrowth of farcical performances by folk musicians. The hillbilly label and image was accepted by most musicians of the 1920s and early 1930s because it partially evoked a nostalgic sense of a mythic mountaineer. By the late 1930s, however, the growing power of a derisive hillbilly stereotype led musicians and the burgeoning country music industry increasingly to embrace the more unambiguously positive cowboy image and the less stigmatized term “country”. Nonetheless, as “hillbilly” and string-band music became interwoven in the popular imagination, its meaning shifted from one denoting only threat and violence to one that primarily signified low humor and carefree frivolity.

Rather than imagining the late Victorian invention of homosexuality as a moment of singular and absolute abjection, the introduction posits the homosexual as a modern agent of neocolonial expansion (the geographies of which are redefined by new visual and information technologies), instrumental both to modern nation-building and transnational flows of capital. A range of mobilities, transformed or generated by industrialization (i.e. class privilege, whiteness, transportation technology, mass media, tourism) and eventually post-industrial society (i.e. communications and information technologies), provide conditions for a cosmopolitan gay male subject. The introduction traces the foundations of gay modernity to gay cosmopolitanism, including the queer, proletarian cosmopolitanism of sailors, soldiers, and cowboys, interrogating how these three figures were deployed to sustain and expand U.S. empire. It is crucial to recover these unexpected routes of queer cosmopolitanism in order to appreciate the links between gay modernity and imperialism.

Reviewing what became a common critical response to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) as "not a gay movie," this chapter contests the prevailing reading of Ennis Del Mar as repressed homosexual, inviting his difference to help open both "gay" and "queer" to new narratives. Ennis's queerness is concentrated unexpectedly in a cowboy ethic; because nationally that ethic is memorialized as heroically masculine, its queerness has dissipated from legend. This chapter restores the queer in cowboy, insisting that we situate Ennis close to home (Wyoming, ranch labor, rural) in order to appreciate his difference. Hence, the chapter challenges a metanarrative for modern gay identity largely founded on migration to metropolitan locales and on gay cosmopolitanism. In contrast to most readings, the chapter uses both Annie Proulx’s story and Lee’s adaptation to critique gay assimilationism and contemporary neoliberal (“homonormative”) gay and lesbian politics.

This chapter is concerned with the role yodeling played in mass media constructions of the fictional cowboy in the early twentieth century. With the emphasis on semiotics and musical connotation, it examines the relationship of yodeling to the attributes of the idealized cowboy in a mythic American West as presented on radio and in film. It relates elements of the cowboy construct, for example bravado and braggadocio, to the specific features of the yodeling heard in the recordings, such as speed and virtuosity. Also considered is the emergence of singing cowgirls, whose themes and styles contrast with those of their male counterparts. Using Wilf Carter as a paradigm for cowboy-style yodeling, the discussion extends to Elton Britt, Slim Whitman, Patsy Montana, harmony yodeling, the Girls of the Golden West, and the DeZurik Sisters, among others. The musical features characterizing cowboy yodeling styles are differentiated from those of hillbilly yodeling styles.

Heroic symbolisms and gender bias have always afflicted politics. This chapter describes the representation of two cultural and political archetypes that inhabits the American political landscape—the cowboy and the welfare queen, which are simultaneously gendered and racialized. The cowboy iconography is recognized for good or ill, displaying characteristics associated with a mythic American heroic figure that tames the wilderness and crusades against outlaws. The welfare queen, in contrast, was a label that detractors gave to poor women, undeservedly growing fat off of government largesse. These represented constructions are the symbols of nation and anti-nation. The chapter sketches the expedition of these icons throughout the political history of America from the tenure of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Such representations had signaled national longings and fears for more than a century. The 2008 presidential election both reflected these icons and upended them with the distinctively non-cowboy persona of Barack Obama.

This chapter analyzes developments in native cattle cultures at the height of the hide and tallow trade. Early management of the feral herds depended on European and American bullock hunters. Around 1832, Hawaiian elites hired vaqueros from California to employ and teach a ranch style of herd management to better control and harvest goods from cattle on the island. California vaqueros and the newly trained Hawaiian paniolo labored with cattle within the European-controlled trade networks of the eastern Pacific. Meanwhile, California Indians outside this system still exploited the predominance of cattle on California’s rangelands through banditry.

Chapter 2 examines what is known about the religious lives of cowboys prior to the existence of organized forms of cowboy Christianity. Moving from the end of the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century, this chapter traces the twists and turns of cowboy life, both real and imagined, and explores various ways that religion has intersected with that history. It begins by outlining the work of cowboys in the second half of the nineteenth century and then turns to the noninstitutional means to evangelize to cowboys—in the form of wandering cowboy preachers and annual camp meetings—that were required to meet the cowboys’ lifestyle and work. The chapter then chronicles the rise and construction of the romantic image of the cowboy against the decline in the real-world cowboy profession, describing some of the uses, in entertainment and evangelism, that this image of the cowboy was put to.