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Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865-1900. By Jacqueline M. Moore. (New York and London: Published by New York University Press in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, c. 2010. Pp. xii, 269. $42.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-5739-0.)
This refreshing study of the late-nineteenth-century cattle kingdom answers the clarion call sounded years ago by gender scholars like E. Anthony Rotundo, Gail Bederman, and Michael S. Kimmel, who argued for a deeper understanding of masculinity, its construction, and iterations throughout American history. Jacqueline M. Moore unpacks hundreds of cowboy and cattleman memoirs, mines autobiographical warhorses familiar to scholars of Texas and the cattle industry, and builds on recent secondary scholarship devoted to western masculinities. Moore challenges readers to rethink the lives of Texas cowboys and cattlemen, exemplars of American manliness so central to western myth and history that their impact on the national psyche...