Nature's Noblemen

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by roughing it in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. Rico uncovers the networks of elite menBritish and Americanwho circulated between the West and the metropoles of London and New York. Each chapter tells the story of an individual who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. All of the men Rico discussesfrom the well known, including Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, to the comparatively obscure, such as English cattle rancher Moreton Frewenenvisioned the American West as a global space into which redemptive narratives of heroic upper-class masculinity could be written.