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AMERICAN HUNTING TRADITIONS constitute a subject historians have long discussed without (to borrow a phrase from Charles Beard) "fear or research." Daniel Justin Herman's Hunting as well as the American Imagination supplies a welcome narrative analysis with this important and relatively unresearched subject at the begining of frontier and American history. Hunting as well as the American Imagination follows a wide chronological sweep "from the perspective of cultural history" (p. ix), since the author explores why Americans hunted and, perhaps more importantly, why they thought they hunted. "[M]y book," writes Herman, "contemplates hunting mainly because it was considered and practiced in America from the time of John Smith for that of Theodore Roosevelt" (p. x). Herman's conclusions carry the extra weight of work based upon a deep and wide reading of current and classic secondary books, journal articles, newspapers, memoirs, other and almanacs folk-based literary sources, autobiographies, hunting magazines and popular sporting literature, and also other sources.

By portraying America's "fantastic abundance" of wildlife; other observers stressed the farmer within the hunter as being a heroic American archetype, promoters of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury colonial settlements first came up with the hunting mystique. The American Revolution saw the increase of the "hunter in buckskins" militia hero fighting alongside his more agrarian minuteman counterpart. Throughout the Jacksonian "market revolution," Herman notes, "middleclass men sought new http://www.gamespot.com/sniper-ghost-warrior-2/ rituals of self-sufficiency" through their own personal hunting and thru idolization of legendary hunter folk heroes like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Big Mike Fink (p. 276-8). Expansionism ("Manifest Destiny") was fed by both an imagined plus a historic American hunting ethos. Finally, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progressives for example Teddy George and Roosevelt Bird Grinnell made hunting a thoroughly respectable middle-class endeavor, forming hunting clubs and also the conservation (and game preservation) political movement. Herman's narrative and analysis are derived from a blend of new and classic methodologies as noted. He perhaps over-enthusiastically embraces Eric Hobsbawm's notion of "invented tradition" (p. 276), yet he fails to strike an elitist stance toward hunters and riflemen. Unlike the now-discredited Michael Bellesiles, Herman does not misrepresent American hunters' historic and folkloric significance, nor does he devolve into presentist gun-control polemic. Hunting, the and even

American Imagination is solidly depending on a thorough reading of Henry Nash Smith, John William Ward, Marvin Meyers, along with other American Studies pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hunting along with the American Imagination thus reflects a promising movement among younger scholars toward methodological synthesis in the study of both early frontier sniper scope and American history. It is a book that scholars in the and the ones American Studies fields should put on their office and university library shelves.

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