The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire

Political Science Associate Professor Ron Schmidt has a new book about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in the  nineteenth-century setting of HBO's Deadwood.

"With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms."

Chapter 3: Vile Task: Founding and Democracy in Deadwood's Imperial Imagination -- Ronald Schmidt

Excerpts from  http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-last-western-9781441126306/

The book is now available from Bloomsbury Publishing

Professor Schmidt is the author of This Is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

He is currently working on a new manuscript investigating the historical and comparative context for contemporary political discourse related to political crisis and mourning.