Westward Expansion
A Splendid Savage: An Interview with Steve Kemper
I’m a Steve Kemper fan. Four years ago, I read his A Labyrinth of Kingdoms with the sort of all encompassing fascination I brought to Gone with the Wind when I was thirteen. I’ve been eagerly awaiting his newest book, A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham, for at least two years.* …
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Custer’s Last Stand?
Sometimes I think that no matter how much we may know about history as individuals, collectively we know nothing at all. Case in point: Custer’s Last Stand. I am currently working on an article that is about a painting about the event that you and I have always known as Custer’s Last Stand.* I went…
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Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles
Historian John Mack Faragher has spent his career writing about frontiers in general and the American West specifically. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, he considers the structure and culture of violence in a frontier society, how violence reproduces and polices itself in a so-called “honor culture,”* and the slow development…
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