Can I read Hunger for the wild : America's obsession with the untamed West on EtoBox?

Hunger for the wild : America's obsession with the untamed West by Michael L. Johnson is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Hunger for the wild : America's obsession with the untamed West about?

Just what was so wild about the Wild West? Americans have had an enduring yet ambivalent obsession with the West as both a place and a state of mind. Now one of the most knowing observers of the Western scene offers a monumental cultural and historical analysis of how ideas of wildness have shaped the ways Euro-Americans have perceived, reacted to, and acted upon the West for nearly five hundred years. Bringing the sensibility of a poet to a sweeping discussion of place, Michael L. Johnson considers how that obsession originated, how it has determined attitudes toward and activities in the West, and how it has changed over the centuries. Investigating views of Western wildness from pre-European times until the present, Johnson tells how explorers and settlers bent on exploiting the West brought with them Old World ideas, full of muddled and even bizarre contradictions, that have defined the region in its most fundamental aspects. And he shows how those contradictory ideas were woven into an ambivalent ideology of conquest that has given us today's degraded wilderness areas, overtaxed water supplies, and sprawling suburbs. Brimming with word-play, personal anecdotes, and telling vig

Author

Michael L. Johnson

Publisher

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9780700615018

Subjects

History, Western, Humanities