ABSTRACT
This book has focused upon two major themes: first, the ways films illustrate the problematic relationship Americans have with their history, and second, how movies are living histories that provide insight into the connection between the American past and present. These two themes converge in the Hollywood Western. As Patricia Nelson Limerick has pointed out in Legacy of Conquest, all people espouse an origin myth, a “tale explaining where its members came from and why they are special, chosen by providence for a special destiny,” and the western frontier has historically served this function for white Americans.1 In the American historical imagination, the frontier and American West embody foundational values connected to the Jeffersonian principles of new beginnings, freedom, and pursuits of happiness. In this regard, the history of the American frontier is as much the history of an idea as much as it is the history of a place. Furthermore, whenever people look to the past to understand who they are and how they came to be, they read the past in terms of the present. In other words, the history they see says more about their contemporary world rather than the past as it actually happened.
