Introduction: The 'Journal of Popular Film and Television' Legacy of Western Scholarship  Part I: Silent Westerns  Chapter 1. The Earliest Western Films: A Checklist of Pre-1900 Prototype Western Films in the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection  Chapter 2. 'The Cross-Heart People': Race and Inheritance in the Silent Westerns  Chapter 3. 'Arizona Jim': The Westerns of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.  Part II: Classic Westerns  Chapter 4. Soldiers in Stetsons: B-Westerns Go to War  Chapter 5. 'Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead': The Early Disney Westerns  Chapter 6. 'Let's Go Home, Debbie': The Matter of Blood Pollution, Combat Culture, and Cold War Hysteria in 'The Searchers' (1956)  Part III: Race and Westerns  Chapter 7. Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the Early Western  Chapter 8. A Fate Worse Than Death: Racism, Transgression, and Westerns  Chapter 9. A Politically Correct Ethan Edwards: Clint Eastwood's 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' (1976)  Part IV: Gender and Westerns  Chapter 10. Howard Hughes and His Western: 'The Maverick and The Outlaw' (1943)  Chapter 11. Carrying Concealed Weapons: Gendered Makeover in 'Calamity Jane' (1953)  Chapter 12. Redesigning Pocahontas: Disney, the 'White Man's Indian', and the Marketing of Dreams  Part V: Revisionist Westerns  Chapter 13. 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller' (1971): Robert Altman's Anti-Western  Chapter 14. Blending Genres, Bending Time: Steampunk of the Western Frontier  Chapter 15. 'Deadwood' (2004-2006), Generic Transformation, and Televisual History  Part VI: Westerns in Global Context  Chapter 16. Shouldering the Weight of the World: The Sensational and Global Appeal of John Wayne's Body  Chapter 17. 'The Man With No Name' (1968): Shane Comes Back in a Korean 'Manchurian Western'  Chapter 18. Hollywood Border Cinema: Westerns with a Vengeance  Selected Bibliography of Westerns on Film and Television

For nearly two centuries, Americans have embraced the Western like no other artistic genre. Creators and consumers alike have utilized this story form in literature, painting, film, radio and television to explore questions of national identity and purpose. Westerns: The Essential Collection comprises the Journal of Popular Film and Television's rich and longstanding legacy of scholarship on Westerns with a new special issue devoted exclusively to the genre. This collection examines and analyzes the evolution and significance of the screen Western from its earliest beginnings to its current global reach and relevance in the 21^st century.

Westerns: The Essential Collection addresses the rise, fall and durability of the genre, and examines its preoccupation with multicultural matters in its organizational structure. Containing eighteen essays published between 1972 and 2011, this seminal work is divided into six sections covering Silent Westerns, Classic Westerns, Race and Westerns, Gender and Westerns, Revisionist Westerns and Westerns in Global Context. A wide range of international contributors offer original critical perspectives on the intricate relationship between American culture and Western films and television series. Westerns: The Essential Collection places the genre squarely within the broader aesthetic, socio-historical, cultural and political dimensions of life in the United States as well as internationally, where the Western has been reinvigorated and reinvented many times. This groundbreaking anthology illustrates how Western films and television series have been used to define the present and discover the future by looking backwards at America's imagined past.