“An important, persuasive, and fascinating intervention in the literature on the American frontier." —Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy “Peter Boag's Re-dressing America's Frontier Past does just that: it re-imagines the American West as a place where cross-dressing is abundant and its meanings are as varied as the individuals themselves. Vividly written and broad in scope, Boag's compelling narrative debunks the gendered myths of the west and writes hundreds of stories back into history.” —Nan Alamilla Boyd, author of Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 “Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past invites readers to reimagine fundamental ideas about sex, gender, and the history of the American West. Brilliant and perceptive, Boag rediscovers a past that once existed but that was forgotten as new ideas about sexuality emerged in the early twentieth century. Boag makes the lives of the West’s many cross-dressers central to his narrative, and the world they reveal gives us an opportunity to understand history in ways that are more comprehensive and humane. Boag's book sheds new light on the American frontier as well as the history of sex and gender.” —Albert Hurtado, author of Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California “Peter Boag uncovers the rich and heretofore hidden history of cross dressers with wit and wisdom, humor and humanity. He adds another crucial layer to our understanding of the West's complicated gendered past and in the process demolishes the region's mythical identity as a virile, white, masculine, heterosexual frontier. The book illuminates the sources of that limited view and liberates us from it.” —Sherry L. Smith, author of Reimaging Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 “A fascinating excursion into a side of western life rarely acknowledged today but surprisingly open and remarked upon at the time. Boag's thoughts on the reasons for the historical blurring are as provocative as his stories are intriguing and often poignant.” —Elliott West, author of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story “This book by the foremost historian of sexuality in the American West is a classic before its time. The history of Westerns cross-dressing is placed within numerous historical contexts, deeply researched, and presented with multiple nuances and thorough analysis. At the same time, we learn of the personal, of the many people who might never have had their significant stories. A stellar and stunning work!” —John R. Wunder, author of “Writing of Race, Class, Gender, and Power in the American West” in North America: Tensions and (Re)Solutions “Original and provocative—Boag finds ample evidence of women and men in western towns and cities who challenged familiar binaries of heteronormative manhood and womanhood through cross-dressing, same-sex intimacy, and trans-gendered identities. But the real story is how communities made meaning of these identities. Boag links sexologists’ promotion of heteronormativity with notions of a redemptive frontier, anti-modernism, and national identity. The results are entirely new perspectives on the imagined West and its place in American history.” —Dee Garceau-Hagen, editor of Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West

Same-Sex Affairs is a path-breaking history of male homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest from 1890 to 1930.

In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.

Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.

On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the time inherited. In Pioneering Death, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western white settler society, their children faced a present and future in frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how Loyd's violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas of childhood in the American West.

In Across the Great Divide, some of our leading historians look to both the history of masculinity in the West and to the ways that this experience has been represented in movies, popular music, dimestore novels, and folklore.

How Pearl Harbor has been written about, thought of, and manipulated in American culture.