Crowded Prairie

This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political racial sexual social and religious - which have beset modern America from Stagecoach and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation labour-management relations generational discord codes of masculinity the Cold War McCarthyism Vietnam increasing individual social alienation and explains why a celebratory genre veered during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity from sagas of national achievement to bleak virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.