Thesis
The visit by Buffalo Bill's Wild West to Barcelona : December 1889 - January 1890
- Creator
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2014
- Thesis identifier
- T13695
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Previous scholarship suggests that the five weeks that Buffalo Bill's Wild West Exhibition spent in Barcelona in the winter of 1889-1890 was the low point of its various European tours if not indeed of its entire existence. The present study challenges that interpretation on the basis of evidence from a substantial body of contemporary sources in Catalan, English and Spanish, including newspaper and magazine coverage of the tour from Spain and the United States, previously unpublished correspondence and memoires by company members, together with official records. It argues for a re-evaluation of the Wild West's only visit to Spain in the context of recent studies of the life and works of William F. Cody by scholars such as Bonner, Kasson, Kroes and Rydell and Warren which have underlined the importance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as a hugely successful and influential American cultural product and international intercultural phenomenon that flourished at a period that was crucial for American nation (re)building in the years after the Civil War, and for the development of United States' relations with Europe in the run-up to the First World War. It discusses the reasons why the exhibition did not return to Spain during its more extensive 1905-1906 European tour and concludes that the enduring influence of dominant historiographic trends found in accounts of Spanish-American international relations between the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Spanish American War of 1898 have been crucial contributing factors to the on-going misunderstanding of the time that Buffalo Bill's Wild West spent in Barcelona. A number of the rare or previously unpublished sources which are cited as evidence in the argument are included as appendices to the study.
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Date Created
- 2014
- Former identifier
- 1028972
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