Archive for the 'SS 2009' Category

The American West: An Invitation to Summer School in Rockford

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When I was growing up, Masterpiece Theater was standard Sunday-night fare on our 13-inch color Zenith.  We also watched Monty Python and Mystery.  It is not that we never watched American programs, but we believed that Brits had it all over us when it came to television.  You can imagine my surprise when my family visited London in 1978.  The rage over there was a brand new show called Dallas, and the girl behind the front desk at our hotel was nonplussed on learning I had never seen an episode.  I later understood that European enthusiasm for American pop culture becomes full-blown fascination when the topic is even remotely associated with the American West.  Over the years, I’ve met Europeans who, while praising John Ford films, argue that the brutal life of America’s inner cities is a legacy of our “lawless frontier.”

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Christopher Check :: Apr.23.2009 :: SS 2009, Summer School :: No Comments »

The American West: Summer School 2009

Join us in Rockford, Illinois, the headquarters of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, for The Rockford Institute’s 12th Annual Summer School: “The American West.”

Theme

Robert Frost held that Americans only became American in the process of fighting wars and moving west.  So much of the American identity, in fact, finds its origins in the frontier experience, that the mythology that resulted thrived in fiction and film long after the frontier disappeared.  The stories from “America’s Homeric age” are tales of conflict: the conflict of man against nature, of course, but also the North-South conflict explored in Owen Wister’s The Virginian and played out in the real-life escapades of the Jameses and Youngers and in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.  Films such as High Noon, Shane, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance explore the conflict between families establishing communities and the individualism and anarchy of bold and rootless men escaping their past.  Finally, a more thorough understanding of the American identity can come from consideration of ethnic conflicts in the West and of conflicting religious visions.  Alongside all of these are the gunfighters, gamblers, con artists, and gold-mining millionaires, and the writers and humorists who have grappled with the West and contributed to its legends: Bret Harte, Owen Wister, Mark Twain, Frederick Jackson Turner, Francis Parkman, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Continue Reading »

Christopher Check :: Jan.07.2009 :: SS 2009, Summer School :: 4 Comments »