Through incisive analysis of the museum’s five institutions, Greg Dickinson and his coauthors reveal how narratives of Native American heritage, violent colonial settlement, Western art, natural history, and ever‑present gun culture collide to shape a haunted sense of American identity.  By tracing the tensions between what is memorialized, what is mythologized, and what is suppressed, the authors expose the ghosts that linger in contemporary understandings of the West and offer a compelling rethinking of how memory and commemoration continue to influence the nation’s cultural imagination.

Greg Dickinson is chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. He is author of Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life.

Eric Aoki is professor of communication studies at Colorado State University. His scholarship has appeared in several journals.

Brian L. Ott is distinguished professor of communication and media at Missouri State University. He is coauthor of Critical Media Studies: An Introduction.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Approaching the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

     Chapter 1. The Place and History of the BBCW

     Chapter 2. Reflections on Theory and Method

     Chapter 3. The Ghost of William F. Cody at the Buffalo Bill Museum

     Chapter 4. Reverence and Survivance at the Plains Indian Museum

     Chapter 5. The Sacred Hymn of the Whitney Western Art Museum

     Chapter 6. Constructing the Master Naturalist

     Chapter 7. New Modes of “How (Not) to See Guns” at the Cody Firearms Museum

Conclusion: Living by the Spirit

Notes

Bibliography

Index