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Westerns
The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier (commonly referred to as the "Old West" or the "Wild West") between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada. The frontier is depicted in Western media as a sparsely populated hostile region patrolled by cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, and numerous other stock gunslinger characters. Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States. Native American populations were often portrayed as averse foes or savages. Originating in vaquero heritage and Western fiction, the genre popularized the Western lifestyle, country- Western music, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Country Music
Country (also called country and western) is a popular music, music genre originating in the southern regions of the United States, both the American South and American southwest, the Southwest. First produced in the 1920s, country music is primarily focused on singing Narrative, stories about Working class in the United States, working-class and blue-collar worker, blue-collar American life. Country music is known for its ballads and dance tunes (i.e., "Honky-tonk#Music, honky-tonk music") with simple form, folk lyrics, and harmonies generally accompanied by instruments such as banjos, fiddles, harmonicas, and many types of guitar (including acoustic guitar, acoustic, electric guitar, electric, steel guitar, steel, and resonator guitar, resonator guitars). Though it is primarily rooted in various forms of American folk music, such as old-time music and Appalachian music, many other traditions, including African-American, Music of Mexico, Mexican, Music of Ireland, Irish, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Wear
Western wear is a category of men's and women's clothing which derives its unique style from the clothes worn in the 19th century Wild West. It ranges from accurate historical reproductions of American frontier clothing, to the stylized garments popularized by Western film and television or singing cowboys such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s. It continues to be a fashion choice in the West and Southwestern United States, as well as people associated with country music or Western lifestyles, for example the various Western or Regional Mexican music styles. Western wear typically incorporates one or more of the following: Western shirts with pearl snap fasteners and vaquero design accents, blue jeans, cowboy hat, a leather belt, and cowboy boots. Hat In the early days of the Old West, it was the bowler hat rather than the slouch hat, center crease (derived from the army regulation Hardee hat), or sombrero that was the most popular among cowboys as i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Music (North America)
Western music is a form of music composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Western music celebrates the Western lifestyle, lifestyle of the cowboy on the open range, along the Rocky Mountains, and among the prairies of Western North America. The genre grew from the mix of cultural influences in the American frontier and what became the Southwestern United States at the time, it came from the American folk music, folk music traditions of those living the region, those being the Appalachian folk music, hillbilly music from those that arrived from the Eastern United States, Eastern U.S., the corrido and ranchera from Northern Mexico, and the New Mexico music, New Mexico and Tejano music, Tejano endemic to the Southwest. The music industry of the mid-20th century grouped the western genre with that of similar folk origins, instrumentation and rural themes, to create the banner of ''country and western music'', whic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Lifestyle
Cowboy culture is the set of behaviors, preferences, and appearances associated with (or resulting from the influence of) the attitudes, ethics, and history of the American cowboy. The term can describe the content or stylistic appearance of an artistic representation, often built on romanticized impressions of the American frontier, wild west, or certain aspects of people's Lifestyle (sociology), lifestyle, such as their choices in recreation (including enjoyment of Western (genre), Western movies and Western music (North America), music), Western wear, apparel, and Cuisine of the Western United States, western or Cuisine of the Southwestern United States, southwestern cuisine. Origins The origins of cowboy culture go back to the Spanish vaqueros who settled in New Mexico and later Texas bringing cattle. By the late 1800s, one in three cowboys were Mexican and brought to the lifestyle its iconic symbols of hats, bandanas, spurs, stirrups, lariat, and lasso. With westward movemen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genre
Genre () is any style or form of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, based on some set of stylistic criteria, as in literary genres, film genres, music genres, comics genres, etc. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility. The proper use of a specific genre is important for a successful transfer of information ( media-adequacy). Critical discussion of genre perhaps began with a classification system for ancient Greek literature, as set out in Aristotle' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manifest Destiny
Manifest destiny was the belief in the 19th century in the United States, 19th-century United States that American pioneer, American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious ("''manifest''") and certain ("''destiny''"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, Romantic nationalism, and white nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American way. It is one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism in the United States. According to historian William Earl Weeks, there were three basic tenets behind the concept: * The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States. * The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life". * The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission. Manifest destiny remained heavily divisive in politics, causing constant conflict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vagrancy
Vagrancy is the condition of wandering homelessness without regular employment or income. Vagrants usually live in poverty and support themselves by travelling while engaging in begging, waste picker, scavenging, or petty theft. In Western countries, vagrancy was historically a crime punishable with forced labor, military service, imprisonment, or confinement to dedicated labor houses. Both ''vagrant'' and ''vagabond'' ultimately derive from the Latin word Wikt:vagari, ''vagari'', meaning "to wander". The term ''vagabond'' and its archaic equivalent ' come from Latin ''vagabundus'' ("strolling about"). In Middle English, ''vagabond'' originally denoted a person without a home or employment. Historical views Vagrants have been historically characterised as outsiders in settled, ordered communities: embodiments of Other (philosophy), otherness, objects of scorn or mistrust, or worthy recipients of help and charity. Some ancient sources show vagrants as passive objects of p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Civilization
A civilization (also spelled civilisation in British English) is any complex society characterized by the development of state (polity), the state, social stratification, urban area, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural language, signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems). Civilizations are organized around densely-populated settlements, divided into more or less rigid hierarchy, hierarchical social classes of division of labour, often with a ruling elite and a subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. Civilizations are characterized by elaborate agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, Innovation, technological advancement, currency, taxation, regulation, and specialization of labour. Historically, a civilization has often been understo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilderness
Wilderness or wildlands (usually in the plurale tantum, plural) are Earth, Earth's natural environments that have not been significantly modified by human impact on the environment, human activity, or any urbanization, nonurbanized land not under extensive agriculture, agricultural cultivation. The term has traditionally referred to terrestrial environments, though human impact on marine life, growing attention is being placed on marine ecosystem, marine wilderness. Recent maps of wilderness suggest it covers roughly one-quarter of Earth's terrestrial surface, but is being rapidly degraded by human activity. Even less wilderness remains in the ocean, with only 13.2% free from intense human activity. Some governments establish protection for wilderness areas by law to not only protected area, preserve what already exists, but also to promote and advance a natural expression and development. These can be set up in preserves, conservation preserves, national forests, national par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morality Drama
The morality play is a genre of Middle Ages, medieval and Tudor period, early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts (most often virtues and vices, but sometimes practices or habits) alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre'', edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 235. English morality plays Hildegard von Bingen's ''Ordo Virtutum'' (English: "Order of the Virtues"), composed c. 1151 in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Fiction
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as ''Bonanza''. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. History Pre-1850s The predecessor of the Western in American literature emerged early with tales of the frontier. The most famous of the early 19th-century frontier novels were James Fenimore Cooper's five novels comprising the '' Leatherstocking Tales''. Cooper's novels were largely set in what was at the time the American frontier: the Appalachian Mountains and areas west of there. As did ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vaquero
The ''vaquero'' (; , ) is a horse-mounted livestock herder of a tradition that has its roots in the Iberian Peninsula and extensively developed in what what is today Mexico (then New Spain) and Spanish Florida from a method brought to the Americas from Spain. The vaquero became the foundation for the North American cowboy, in Northern Mexico, Southwestern United States, Florida and Western Canada. The cowboys of the Great Basin still use the term " buckaroo", which may be a corruption of ''vaquero'', to describe themselves and their tradition. Many in Llano Estacado and along the southern Rio Grande prefer the term ''vaquero'', while the indigenous and Hispanic communities in the age-old ''Nuevo México'' and New Mexico Territory regions use the term ''caballero''. ''Vaquero'' heritage remains in the culture of Mexico (Especially in Northern Mexico), along with the Californio (California), Neomexicano (New Mexico), Tejano (Texas), Central, and South America, as well as other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
