From dime novels to Wild West movies, from cowboy heroes to tribal villains, from masculine mystique to female virtue: the 19th-century American West has captured both popular imagination and academic interest for over a century. Despite this persistent attention, the region's rich, varied and plentiful material culture has received only selective consideration, leaving many aspects of everyday trans-Mississippi life untold. This book, for the very first time, brings together a large number of historic photographs, drawings, manuscript diaries and needlework projects from archives across the United States. Its multidisciplinary analysis considers how migrants and settlers used their architecture, spatial practice, clothes and diet to make themselves at home in unfamiliar surroundings. In the process it deconstructs stereotypes which have clung to the 19th-century western spaces and people for decades.
By:
Nina Vollenbroeker
Imprint: I.B. Tauris
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781784538491
ISBN 10: 1784538493
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 05 January 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Introduction: Skills and Objects The spatial agency of mobility.Chapter One: Eight trunks, three carpet bags, one washtub of little trees, utensils for cooking and two provision boxes Taking home onto the trails.Chapter Two: My kitchen is roofed by the blue dome of heaven Practicing a multiscalar home.Chapter Three: We sleep rolled in Indian blankets like silk worms in cocoons Home as Contact Zone.Chapter Four: Who am I when I am not where I have been? The performance of self in unfamiliar space.Chapter Five: And so I look back to the home I left behind Revers transfers.ConclusionIndex
Nina Vollenbrocker teaches architectural practice, history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK. She is a practicing architect and earned her PhD in Architectural History at the Bartlett in 2013. She previously ran a design studio and was seminar leader at Kingston University in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and a Visiting Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Brighton, UK.
