Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild West

Burke, John M., -1917Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
350K words
Chapters
35

Tags

English Originals World HistoryHistorical Figures Historical ReappraisalLegendary LivesAdventure JourneyHeroismFamous FiguresDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today."Buffalo Bill" from Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild WestAuthor: Burke, John M., -1917,Language: English, Class: F590.3: United States local history: The West. Trans-Mississippi Region. Great Plains, Release Date: Jun 13, 2015

Editor's review

This book is John M. Burke's biographical text on Buffalo Bill, subtitled "From Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild West." It belongs to a genre at the intersection of American Western local history and popular biography, centered on the figure of Buffalo Bill and showing how nineteenth-century American Western narratives were told, circulated, and shaped. Its value lies in offering a period text: readers can see how a writer of the time organized a subject's experiences and understood the relationship between "the West" and "authentic history." It suits readers interested in the history of the American West, popular cultural history, and biography, and serves as supplementary material for studying the construction of the Western image. Readers should note the author's standpoint and historical context and treat the narrative as historical material rather than modern scholarly conclusion. The public-domain electronic edition is convenient for searching names, places, and events and suits thematic excerpting.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. First outline Buffalo Bill's basic timeline, then check the narrative against the text.
  2. Mark the author's evaluative language while reading, distinguishing factual statements from image-making.
  3. Pair with a modern overview of American Western history to observe the period text's selections and omissions.
  4. Excerpt by person, place, or event for later thematic research.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
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  34. 34
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FAQ

Is this a rigorous modern biography? It is not a rigorous biography in the modern scholarly sense. It is a biographical text colored by its era, with the author's own narrative standpoint and choices. Read it as historical material and attend to how it tells the story of the figure and the West, rather than expecting it to meet the evidentiary standards of contemporary scholarly biography.
Is the "authentic history" claim credible? The "authentic history" in the subtitle is the author's self-description, not a verified conclusion in the modern historiographical sense. The text arose in a particular era, and its narrative may include image-making and popularization. Readers should compare it with other sources and distinguish event records from narrative embellishment.
Is it suitable as research material for the history of the American West? It can be used as supplementary material, especially for studying how the Western image was told and circulated. But it should not be the sole basis. Compare it with modern scholarship and archival materials, and note version information and the author's standpoint, to make the most of its value as a historical source.

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About the author

Burke, John M., -1917 Author

John M. Burke (Burke, John M., -1917) is the author of Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild West, and he died in 1917. Public information about his life is quite limited: his nationality, education, and professional career are not clearly documented, and only one of his works is held in our collection. Judging from the surviving work, his writing centers on the American frontier era and the legendary career of Buffalo Bill Cody, belonging to the popular Western documentary and biographical writing that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such works were often based on firsthand experience or interviews and addressed to general readers; they helped shape the image of the "Wild West" and spread frontier narratives, and they remain useful to later studies of Western show culture and frontier mythology. His book is still regarded as a source for understanding Buffalo Bill's life and the era of the Wild West show.