Bücher von Jeremy Agnew

Takes a thorough look at unconventional medical gadgets, as well as the strange devices and therapies used by both fringe and legitimate healers, and places them in the perspective of modern medicine. The author argues that quackery should not be defined by the ineffectiveness of a therapy, but rather be based on fraudulent intent.

Chronicles the history of filming Westerns on location, from shooting on the East Coast in the early 1900s; through the use of locations in Utah, Arizona, and California in the 1940s and 1950s; and filming Westerns in Mexico, Spain, and other parts of the world in the 1960s.

Rooted in the palliative health reforms of the early 19th century, spas of the Victorian Age grew out of the hydrotherapy institutions of the 1840s. The treatments, though sometimes of a dubious nature, formed the transition from the primitive methods of ""heroic medicine"" to the era of scientifically based practices.

Presents a history of dime novels and pulp magazines from approximately 1850 to 1960, describing how sensational pulp literature filled a need among readers and flowered during the evolving social conditions of the Industrial Revolution. It provides a comprehensive story of why pulp books and magazines appeared, what this type of literature was, how it became popular.

To provide a realistic account of criminal justice, this book provides a factual history of crime and punishment in the Old West from about 1850 to 1900. The focus is how criminals in the Old West came into conflict with the law and what happened after they were apprehended. The book describes the entire criminal justice process.

The traditional narrative of the American West tells of a frontier settled by pioneers emigrating from the east to the Pacific coast. Yet Spanish conquistadors arrived in Central America 150 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. With them came missionaries who tried to convert the Pueblo and Plains Indians to Christianity by force, a suppression of native religious beliefs that led to cultural clashes and outright war. This is the story--fully documented--of how Spanish explorers, soldiers and men of the church pushed north from Mexico in the 1500s, seeking riches and establishing settlements from Texas to California 250 years before the influx of American settlers in the mid-1800s.

As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.

This book explores the role and influence of drink and drugs (primarily opium) in the Old West, which for this book is considered to be America west of the Mississippi from the California gold rush of the 1840s to the closing of the Western Frontier in roughly 1900. This period was the first time in American history that heavy drinking and drug abuse became a major social concern. Drinking was considered to be an accepted pursuit for men at the time. Smoking opium was considered to be deviant and associated with groups on the fringes of mainstream society, but opium use and addiction by women was commonplace. This book presents the background of both substances and how their use spread across the West, at first for medicinal purposes--but how overuse and abuse led to the Temperance Movement and eventually to National Prohibition. This book reports the historical reality of alcohol and opium use in the Old West without bias.

   For many years, movie audiences have carried on a love affair with the American West, believing Westerns are escapist entertainment of the best kind, harkening back to the days of the frontier. This work compares the reality of the Old West to its portrayal in movies, taking an historical approach to its consideration of the cowboys, Indians, gunmen, lawmen and others who populated the Old West in real life and on the silver screen. Starting with the Westerns of the early 1900s, it follows the evolution in look, style, and content as the films matured from short vignettes of good-versus-bad into modern plots.