Historical and Imagined GIS Borderlandscapes of the American West: Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove Tetralogy and LA Noirscapes

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Charles Travis
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
American West ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Gis Analysis ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Euclidian Space ◽  
Fiction Writers

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning counter-western Lonesome Dove (part of a tetralogy, set between 1840 and 1900) and the works of LA Noir detective fiction writers (from the 1940s to 1997) represent the American west and urban southwest of Los Angeles as a dynamic mosaic of human and environmental borderlandscapes. McMurtry's perspective provides an Anglo-European eye, influenced by Cervantean Iberian literary tropes on the transformation of the West from indigenous and Spanish trails to American rail-road tracks. The LA Noirscapes map phenomenologically illustrates how the location of novel settings cluster in contiguous and convergent places on a street grid palimpsest of Los Angeles between 1949 and 1997. Employing HumGIS methods, this essay considers the marriage of empirical cartography and impressionistic topography; the former concerned with latitude, longitude and space, the latter with plotting literary, historical and cultural perceptions and experiences of place. By engaging the concept of Euclidian space with the phenomenology of place, geographers can contextualize field work, and other methods with literary, cartographical and GIS analysis to uncover the means to craft new avenues to study the dynamic and symbiotic formations of historical landscapes, identities, senses of place and location.

Brothels and Prostitution in the American West

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-98
Author(s):  
Rebecca Yamin ◽  
Donna J. Seifert
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
North Dakota ◽  
American West ◽  
First Person ◽  
The West ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Mining Towns ◽  
Experiences Of Women

This chapter reviews studies of the archaeology of brothels and prostitution in the American West. Early studies considered the material culture of the brothel and the saloon, partner institutions in mining towns. Archaeological data from recent excavations in Sandpoint, Idaho; Prescott, Arizona; Ouray, Colorado; Aliso Street, in Los Angeles, California; and Fargo, North Dakota; provide a wealth of data on the lives of women working in brothels. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how archaeological data and women’s first-person narratives help to reveal the lives and experiences of women in brothels of the West.

Fleeing the Soviet Union, Dancing on the West Coast

Experiment ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Lorin Johnson ◽  
Donald Bradburn
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
High Power ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The West ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
First Time

In the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles audiences saw Soviet defectors Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov, Natalia Makarova, and Rudolf Nureyev in the prime of their careers at the Hollywood Bowl, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Greek Theater. Dance photographer Donald Dale Bradburn, a local Southern California dancer describes his behind-the-scenes access to these dancers in this interview. Perfectly positioned as Dance Magazine’s Southern California correspondent, Bradburn offers a candid appraisal of the Southern California appeal for such high-power Russian artists as well as their impact on the arts of Los Angeles. An intimate view of Russian dancers practicing their craft on Los Angeles stages, Bradburn’s interview is illustrated by fourteen of his photographs, published for the first time in this issue of Experiment.

scholarly journals The Concept of Place in the American West

Linguaculture ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Irina Chirica
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
American West ◽  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
The West ◽  
John Ford ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Louisiana Purchase ◽  
Cultural Concept

This paper surveys the most significant ways in which the American West has been viewed as a place and region. Starting with Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803, we follow the expansion of the West as a region throughout American history. Jefferson worked out a plan which involved the creation of territories which later became states, following a certain procedure. Inside the larger West, there are many Wests: the prairie states of the Midwest (also called the “Bread Basket” of America), the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and California. We analyze the myths and images associated with the west in American culture, and the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay dedicated to “the Frontier”. We discuss the New Historicism approach and the way in which it criticizes Tuner. Then we discuss the reflection of the West in the visual arts (the major landscape painters and in the work of the western movie director John Ford). We bring arguments to support the idea that the West is a construct of human experience and a cultural concept, more than a “place”.

scholarly journals Wildscapes, Dudescapes, and the Dude Ranching Aesthetic: Grand Teton National Park 1908-1940

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 48-52
Author(s):  
Amanda Rees
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
American West ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
The West ◽  
Grand Teton National Park ◽  
Jackson Hole ◽  
To Receive

"Dude Ranch" is not an expression that carries a clear-cut meaning to everyone, for a dude ranch is neither a summer hotel nor a farm where dudes "ranch". . .. The most typical dude ranches of all the West are in this section of Wyoming. They range all the way from the most exclusive outfits that require references and advance reservations for not les than three weeks or a month at around $70 per week per person-including saddle horse and equipment, modern cabin, meals and other advantages-to the guest ranches or outfitters where accommodation may be had by the day, week or season. The person of moderate means can arrange his vacation in Jackson Hole to fit his purse. (Jackson Hole: Where to Go and What To See, published between 1929-1950) The American West is home to one of the most distinctive agricultural tourism activities in the world: dude ranching (Rees 2004). Dude ranching is the "single most unique contribution of the Rocky Mountain West to the ever-growing national vacation industry" (Roundy 1973), and it has been crucial in shaping the ways in which the West is perceived, working to effect continuing romantic notions of the American West (Rodnitzky, 1968). Though dude ranches can be found in the East (Zimmerman 1998), the South, the Southwest, California, Hawaii, and the Northwest, it is the Northern Rocky Mountain region, especially Montana and Wyoming, which forms the nucleus of dude ranch tourism (Rees 2005). However, unlike cattle ranching, agriculture, and mineral extraction, tourism has rarely received the attention it deserves in Wyoming, though it continues to be an important part of the Western image, as well as an important factor in the production and reproduction of that image. Just as dude ranching has failed to receive the attention it deserves in the state, it has also failed to receive that attention in one of the region's densest nexus or collection of dude ranching, Jackson Hole, and in particular, Grand Teton National Park (GTNP). Indeed, dude ranches have faired miserably in the first seventy-five years of the park's existence. As cultural landscapes dude ranches have been de­emphasized in favor of celebrating the natural environment. This project's research has revealed that a vast majority of the thirty-three dude ranches that once functioned in what is now GTNP have disappeared, been auctioned off, burned, pulled down, or allowed to rot in situ. In the last decade, critics of federal cultural resource management philosophy sought to reject this often-fragmented approach to cultural heritage protection, and looked to embrace environmental and cultural resources as an indivisible whole (Hufford 1994) and this research project falls within that effort to produce a narrative that embraces both environmental and cultural resources to tell a story of the ways in which humans and nature have interacted through tourism in GTNP.

scholarly journals Changes in Winter Atmospheric Rivers along the North American West Coast in CMIP5 Climate Models

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Warner ◽  
Clifford F. Mass ◽  
Eric P. Salathé
Keyword(s):  
Water Vapor ◽  
North American ◽  
West Coast ◽  
American West ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Water Vapor Transport ◽  
The West ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events

Abstract Most extreme precipitation events that occur along the North American west coast are associated with winter atmospheric river (AR) events. Global climate models have sufficient resolution to simulate synoptic features associated with AR events, such as high values of vertically integrated water vapor transport (IVT) approaching the coast. From phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), 10 simulations are used to identify changes in ARs impacting the west coast of North America between historical (1970–99) and end-of-century (2070–99) runs, using representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5. The most extreme ARs are identified in both time periods by the 99th percentile of IVT days along a north–south transect offshore of the coast. Integrated water vapor (IWV) and IVT are predicted to increase, while lower-tropospheric winds change little. Winter mean precipitation along the west coast increases by 11%–18% [from 4% to 6% (°C)−1], while precipitation on extreme IVT days increases by 15%–39% [from 5% to 19% (°C)−1]. The frequency of IVT days above the historical 99th percentile threshold increases as much as 290% by the end of this century.

The Changing American West

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory L. Simon
Keyword(s):  
American West ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Fire Risk ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
The West ◽  
Fire Activity ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
Activity Trends ◽  
Synoptic View

This chapter establishes a conceptual justification for the implementation of an affluence-vulnerability interface analytic approach to manage current and prospective suburban landscapes—indeed a major characteristic of the West is the immense amount of land currently still eligible for suburban and exurban conversion. Along with this important land characteristic, it provides a synoptic view of the rapidly transforming West more generally through a discussion of recent suburbanization, climatic, and fire activity trends. Most importantly “the Incendiary” is introduced as a metaphor for treating the suburban West like a troubled patient (an arsonist) with deeply held and engrained behaviors and characteristics. The chapter suggests that engaging the West as merely a flammable landscape is to confront symptoms of the Incendiary, while confronting the Incendiary itself is to treat the essential character and core mechanisms driving growth and social-environmental changes in high fire risk landscapes at the urban fringe.

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