Cowboys and Politics
Category: Politics... Society & Culture...
Posted Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 05:44 PM [GMT-6]

The Donald C. and Elizabeth M. Dickson Research Center serves as the library and archives of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Its mission, to quote the website, "is to preserve, document, and interpret the heritage of the American West for the enrichment of the public by collecting, arranging, describing, making available, and preserving library, photographic, and archival materials related to the West and its social and cultural history."

I've just come across one of the Center's online exhibits entitled Like a Cowboy: Imagery in Politics, Prose and Reality. The exhibit is a series of images juxtaposed against blurbs of text taken from a wide variety of sources, including poetry, newspaper and magazine articles, personal correspondence...and even the blogosphere.

It's a jumble of perspectives, where the lyrics to Song of the Cattle Trail, a 1907 postcard showing the start of a cattle drive and a quote from a magazine published in 1895 bump up against an excerpt from, well, this.

Like a Cowboy is an unfiltered look at how cowboys -- and the concept of the cowboy -- has been used and misused through the years. Apart from the dubious judgment of including a portion of a Gazette post (an acknowledgement which I nevertheless gratefully accept), it's a fascinating presentation. The old photos alone are worth a visit.

Technorati tag: National Cowboy Museum