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AMERICAN HUNTING TRADITIONS constitute a subject historians have long discussed without (toborrow a phrase from Charles Beard) "fear or research." Daniel Justin Herman's Hunting and theAmerican Imagination gives a welcome narrative analysis of the important and relativelyunresearched subject during early frontier and American history.

Hunting and the American Imagination follows a large chronological sweep "through the perspectiveof cultural history" (p. ix), as the author explores why Americans hunted and, perhaps moreimportantly, why they thought they hunted. "[M]y book," writes Herman, "contemplates huntingsince it was seriously considered and practiced in America from the moment of John Smith to this ofTheodore Roosevelt" (p. x). Herman's conclusions carry the extra weight of work according to a deepand wide reading of current and classic secondary books, journal articles, memoirs, other,newspapers and almanacs folk-based literary sources, autobiographies, hunting magazines andpopular sporting literature, as sniper scope well as sniper scope other sources.

By portraying America's "fantastic abundance" of wildlife; other observers stressed the farmer overthe hunter being a heroic American archetype, promoters of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centurycolonial settlements first came up with the hunting mystique. The American Revolution saw the riseof the "hunter in buckskins" militia hero fighting alongside his more agrarian minutemancounterpart. In the Jacksonian "market revolution," Herman notes, "middle-class men sought newrituals of sniper scope self-sufficiency" through their own hunting and through idolization oflegendary hunter folk heroes like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and large Mike Fink (p. 276-8).Expansionism ("Manifest Destiny") was fed by both an imagined and a historic American huntingethos. Finally, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progressives such as Teddy George andRoosevelt Bird Grinnell made hunting a thoroughly respectable middle-class endeavor, forminghunting clubs and the conservation (and game preservation) political movement.

Herman's narrative and analysis derive from a combination of new and classichttp://www.auctionsniper.com/ methodologies as noted. He perhaps over-enthusiastically embracesEric Hobsbawm's perception of "invented tradition" (p. 276), yet he does not strike an elitist stancetoward hunters and riflemen. Unlike the now-discredited Michael Bellesiles, Herman will notmisrepresent American hunters' historic and folkloric significance, nor does he devolve intopresentist gun-control polemic. Indeed, Hunting along with the American Imagination is solidlydepending on a complete reading of Henry Nash Smith, John William Ward, Marvin Meyers, and alsoother American Studies pioneers in the 1960s and 1950s.

Hunting and the American Imagination thus reflects a promising movement among younger scholarstoward methodological synthesis in study regarding both early American and frontier history. This isa book that scholars in the and others American Studies fields should put on their university andoffice library shelves.