Through incisive analysis of the museum’s five institutions, Greg Dickinson and his coauthors reveal how narratives of Native American heritage, violent colonial settlement, Western art, natural history, and ever‑present gun culture collide to shape a haunted sense of American identity. By tracing the tensions between what is memorialized, what is mythologized, and what is suppressed, the authors expose the ghosts that linger in contemporary understandings of the West and offer a compellin...

As communicative, cultural, and political spaces, cities present a vast array of racial, ethnic, national, sexual, and socioeconomic experiences around which human communities take shape. This shaping forms a germinal point of mass cultural life. City planners decide where buildings and neighborhoods are developed, which ultimately affects who residents interact with, how they get there, and why they choose city life. From these experiences, boundaries and possibilities arise that define c...