Western powers are addicted to stealing and warmongeringand their days at the top of civilization are numbered. To prove this point, Rocky M. Mirza, Ph.D., traces the rise of the Western powers from the Greek and Roman empires through the Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, German, Italian, and American empires. He argues that the West has: promoted private property over communal property, which has created huge inequalities of wealth. encouraged the production and consumption of goods instead of preserving our planet. exploited Third World workers to satisfy obese citizens addicted to super-size portions. From the time Portugal found a sea route to India and Spain rediscovered the New World, the West has sought to steal and kill. At first, Muslims in the Middle East and powerful countries in Asia thwarted Western ambitions, but the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century changed the landscape. Instead of building mutually beneficial relationships, Western empiresfrom the Portuguese to the Americanhave sought to solely look out for their own interests. Find out how the balance is shifting in How the West was Won and Lost.

As part of the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, this edition contains exclusive bonus materials! They came by river and by wagon train, braving the endless distances of the Great Plains and the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada. They were men like Linus Rawlings, a restless survivor of Indian country who’d headed east to see the ocean but left his heart—and his home—in the West. They were women like Lilith Prescott, a smart, spirited beauty who fled her family and fell for a gambling man in the midst of a frontier gold boom. These pioneering men and women sowed the seeds of a nation with their courage—and with their blood. Here is the story of how their paths would meet amid the epic struggle against fierce enemies and nature’s cruelty, to win for all time the rich and untamed West. Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives. In Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volumes 1, Beau L’Amour takes the reader on a guided tour through many of the finished and unfinished short stories, novels, and treatments that his father was never able to publish during his lifetime. L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, No Traveller Returns, faithfully completed for this program, is a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas. These exciting publications will be followed by Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2. Additionally, many beloved classics will be rereleased with an exclusive Lost Treasures postscript featuring previously unpublished material, including outlines, plot notes, and alternate drafts. These postscripts tell the story behind the stories that millions of readers have come to know and cherish.

This volume contains articles on various aspects of literary imagination, with essays ranging from Petrarch to Voltaire, on the canon, with essays on western history as one of shifting cultural ideals, and on the Christian Middle Ages. The volume is a Festschrift for Burcht Pranger of the University of Amsterdam.

This anthology examines Love's Labours Lost from a variety of perspectives and through a wide range of materials. Selections discuss the play in terms of historical context, dating, and sources; character analysis; comic elements and verbal conceits; evidence of authorship; performance analysis; and feminist interpretations. Alongside theater reviews, production photographs, and critical commentary, the volume also includes essays written by practicing theater artists who have worked on the play. An index by name, literary work, and concept rounds out this valuable resource.

California matters, both as a place and as an idea. What famed historian Kevin Starr has called “the California Dream” is a vital part of American self-understanding. Just as America was meant to be a place of renewal, even redemption, for Europe, so too California was intended as a place of renewal for America. Therefore, California—place and idea—provides a fertile ground for scholars to think deeply about what it means to articulate “the promise of American life.” This book follows in the train of George Marsden’s classic The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship—believing that people of faith have a contribution to make to scholarship—and of Jay Green’s more recent book, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Views—believing that scholars of faith should engage in moral inquiry. In this book, eight authors inquire into the moral questions that emerge from studying California.

As a twenty-three-year-old student in mid-1930s, pre-World War II China, John DeFrancis did not set out to make a thousand-mile camel trek across the Gobi Desert, become the prisoner of a Muslim warlord, or travel twelve hundred miles down the bandit-infested Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft. But these were just some of the adventures experienced by the author and his traveling companion when they tried to retrace the footsteps of Genghis Khan and ended up dodging the fighting between the Communists nearing the end of their Long March and a coalition of forces under Chiang Kai-shek's Central Government and a cabal of Muslim warlords. Informed by an extensive knowledge of Chinese history and punctuated with keen observation and gentle humor, the narrative is a personal history that can be read both as a tale of high adventure in the wild west of China and as prelude to the present in that tortured land. Westerners can no longer trace the footsteps of Genghis Khan. Many areas of China that challenged the adventuresome were declared off-limits more than a half-century ago - and the Gobi Desert and sensitive border regions are still inaccessible.

Though one of the most popular genres for decades, the western started to lose its relevance in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the early 1980s it had ridden into the sunset on screens both big and small. The genre has enjoyed a resurgence, however, and in the past few decades some remarkable westerns have appeared on television and in movie theaters. From independent films to critically acclaimed Hollywood productions and television series, the western remains an important part of American popular culture. Running the gamut from traditional to revisionist, with settings ranging from the old West to the “new Wests” of the present day and distant future, contemporary westerns continue to explore the history, geography, myths, and legends of the American frontier. In Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television since 1990, Andrew P. Nelson has collected essays that examine the trends and transformations in this underexplored period in Western film and television history. Addressing the new Western, they argue for the continued relevance and vibrancy of the genre as a narrative form. The book is organized into two sections: “Old West, New Stories” examines Westerns with common frontier locales, such as Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Deadwood, and True Grit. “New Wests, Old Stories” explores works in which familiar Western narratives, characters, and values are represented in more modern—and in one case futuristic—settings. Included are the films No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, as well as the shows Firefly and Justified. With a foreword by Edward Buscombe, as well as an introduction that provides a comprehensive overview, this volume offers readers a compelling argument for the healthy survival of the Western. Written for scholars as well as educated viewers, Contemporary Westerns explores the genre’s evolving relationship with American culture, history, and politics.

The beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, and the LAPD Rampart Scandal: these events have been interpreted by the courts, the media and the public in dramatically conflicting ways. Critical Race Narratives examines what is at stake in these conflicts and, in so doing, rethinks racial strife in the United States as a highly-charged struggle over different methods of reading and writing. Focusing in particular on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debatesincluding The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

Westerners love an existential crisis. Each decade since the First World War has raised up prophets of doom proclaiming the end of the Western world as we know it. But this time it's real. Weighed down by economic woes, the seemingly endless war on terror, and the declining power of religion as a unifying force, the West has been limping along. With the public sphere fraying and authoritarian politics rising, this deep-seated crisis is now urgent, and potentially fatal. How did we get here? Ben Ryan's diagnosis is simple: the West is a myth, and it is dying. Its own people are no longer convinced or united by its defining ideal--a sense of universal morals, and of constant progress towards them. Following a series of 'system failures', Westerners--from urban millennials to post-industrial workers-- have lost faith in the West as a moral force. Yet there is a chance for redemption, if we can forge a new common myth of the West: one reviving its great values, and reshaping its ideals for a diverse, forward-looking world. This smart and thoughtful book explores what the West is, what has happened to it, and how we might save it.

His premise is that civilizations have “life spans,” and the Western civilization that produced America and Europe has been replaced, in our lifetime, and before our very eyes. To people whose minds were made by the West, the civilization we now find ourselves in often feels wrong, evil even, but we also find ourselves feeling oddly affectionate toward this strange new world. And the more time that passes, the more “normal” the New Civ gets to feel. We sometimes have to “pinch” ourselves to remember that society once had roots in a universe that knew something of moral absolutes, where the horrible behaviors we now read about in every morning newspaper were so rare that one such event in a year would have felt like the world is just about to end. But these things are what passes for “normalcy” today. We are still able to be reminded of what we know in our bones, although it gets harder all the time: something has gone terribly wrong. That’s what this book is about.