There are many myths about the American west. There’s the myth of bringing order out of a savage wasteland. The myth of disordered and uncivilized native Americans. The myth of the noble Caucasian cowboy. The myth of rugged individualists who wrested a living from the earth without help from anyone else. And the myth of women without agency who deferred to men. All of these are wrong. Yet they are remarkably sticky in American cultural consciousness according to historian Megan Kate Nelson. Nelson will speak at Illinois State University on March 19. Her talk How the Real West was Lost: The Frontier Myth and the Erasure of U.S. Western History is part of history department programming sponsored by the Sage Foundation. Nelson’s new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier is out at the end of the month from Simon & Schuster.

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