Posts Tagged ‘American west’
How the Wickedest City in the American West Created Frontier Justice In Spite of Itself
Tom Clavin opens Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and the Wickedest Town in the American West with Masterston stepping off the train in Dodge City, expecting trouble. The scene is tense; Clavin deliberately evokes the images of lawlessness, and violence associated with the city’s name. (Not to mention similar images attached to Masterston himself.)…
Read More
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…
Read More