{"product_id":"the-conservative-aesthetic-theodore-roosevelt-popular-darwinism-and-the-american-literary-west-9781793632616","title":"The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt,","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow did the aesthetics of a mythic Western ethos shape our past and modern understanding of conservatism? Mexal’s eloquently written work answers this timely question. Breaking from histories of conservatism that locate its emergence after WWII, Mexal offers a fresh reading of conservatism as an aesthetic movement, one that was not only born in the political sphere, but in the cultural realms of literature and art. In doing so, he reads known and unknown literatures and histories in fresh and exciting ways, and, in the end, he gives us a study that will be foundational in Western American culture. \u003c\/p\u003e -- John-Michael Rivera, recipient of the Western American Literature Book Award and author of UNDOCUMENTS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction: The Old Iron Days \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart I: Gentlemen of the West (1880-1884)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 1: Roosevelt in the Badlands\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 2: Wister Goes West\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 3: Frederic Remington’s Vanishing West \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 4: A Self-Made Man \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 5: Remington and the Art of Scientific Representation \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 6: Wister’s Legal Education \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 7: “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Selling of the West \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart II: The Early History of Conservatism (1689-1880)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 8: The Nature of Freedom \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 9: Emerson’s Great Man Theory of History \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 10: Darwin Comes to America \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 11: The Redeemers, the Socialists, and Conservatism After the Civil War \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart III: Selling a Darwinian West (1884-1890)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 12: Equal to All Occasions \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 13: Cody and the Queen \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 14: The Cowboy of Dakota\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 15: Remington’s Great White West \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 16: Natural Inequality and the Course of Progress \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 17: The Ghost Dance \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart IV: In Search of a Practical History (1890-1895)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 18: The Johnson County War \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 19: The World’s Columbian Exposition \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 20: The Boone and Crockett Club \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 21: Environmental Conservation and Political Conservatism \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 22: The Science of Western History \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 23: A Practical Conservatism \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 24: The Evolution of a Cowboy \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 25: The Bronco Busters \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 26: Progress, Populism, and the Lure of War\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart V: Cuba and the New West (1896-1902)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 27: The Rush of War \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 28: The Cowboy Regiment Abroad \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 29: Rewriting a Legacy \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 30: The Virginian and the White House \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEpilogue: The Cowboy President\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lexington Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51042663629143,"sku":"9781793632616","price":87.3,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781793632616.jpg?v=1750955076","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-conservative-aesthetic-theodore-roosevelt-popular-darwinism-and-the-american-literary-west-9781793632616","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}