Jacob W. Olmstead

The Frontier Centennial (eBook, ePUB)

Fort Worth and the New West

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In 1936, the Texas centennial was celebrated across the state. In The Frontier Centennial, Jacob Olmstead argues that Fort Worth's celebration of the centennial represented a unique opportunity to reshape the city's identity and align itself with a progressive future. Olmstead draws out the Frontier Centennial from its inception as a commemorative fair to theme park enshrining the mythic West to show the various ways centennial planners, boosters, and civic leaders sought to use the celebration as a means to bolster the city's identity and image as a modern city of the American West.

Olmstead's retelling of the Frontier Centennial looks at two distinctive processes. The first addresses the interplay of memory, identity, and image in the evolution of the celebration's commemorative messages. Fort Worth's image as a progressive western metropolis also impacted other areas, less central, to Frontier Centennial planning. Debates over how outsiders would interpret features of the celebration, carried on by club women and others, reveal the interest the citizenry held in upholding or contesting the city's modern image. Overlapping with the issues of memory and identity, the second process addresses how the larger narratives of the mythic West influenced the content of the celebration. Though drawn from actual events and people, the myth reduces the past to its "ideological essence." Mythmakers, like historians, draw upon facts to explain and give meaning to a particular worldview.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. August 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781682830840
• Artikelnr.: 75601151

Autorenporträt

Jacob W. Olmstead is a Curator of Historic Sites in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2011 he received a Ph.D. in American History from Texas Christian University, where he studied civic memory and identity in the American West. His research and writing has appeared in BYU Studies, Journal of Mormon History, Mormon Historical Studies, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and Utah Historical Quarterly.