![]() The rest of the stats can speak for themselves: 21 Bucking Stock of the Year Winners, which include 3 Bareback Horse Titles, 7 Saddle Bronc Horse Titles and 11 Bucking Bull of the Year Titles. In 1998 Hampton was recognized as IPRA’s Stock Contractor of the Year which is a title that he has now been awarded a record 21 times. Hampton Rodeo has had much success within the rodeo industry having won awards too numerous to mention individually. His rodeos gained recognition by rough stock cowboys who liked his stock and timed event cowboys who appreciated the time and effort Hampton put into keeping even sets of timed event cattle. Hampton began booking rodeos regionally and became a member of the International Professional Rodeo Association. In a series of events that followed Hampton found himself holding the reins to his own stock contracting business and he hasn’t looked back since. Having no bucking stock of his own, he hired a local stock contractor to put on the rodeos. ![]() He grew up roping calves and steers and built a small indoor arena to practice in, but before long, he was hosting small jackpots and rodeos there. Yet Ford’s book still is a great starting point for further research in multiple subfields, and it should be read before any scholar continues deeper into these avenues of American history.Kevin Hampton was fresh out of high school in when his stock contracting business began to take flight. Surely the third chapter-“‘Bucking the Odds and Breaking New Ground’: Native Americans Ranching for Others and Rodeoing for Themselves”-could fill 200 pages on its own, much to the satisfaction of Great Plains historians and scholars. Each of the groups researched here is deserving of its own monograph, perhaps, instead of each being just one part of an overall examination of how American West stereotypes have been so misleading. The association of rodeo with the American West and the Great Plains is imprinted in historical consciousness, yet Ford successfully overwrites stereotypical perceptions with her analysis. ![]() Combined with Ford’s meticulous research, it is a helpful addition to keep details appropriately organized for the reader. Also included is a short glossary of terms (187–89), which is beneficial for all readers. With connections to the present, Ford successfully explores change over time in multiple historiographical realms. In five chapters, each covering a different group’s origins and evolution in the American West, Ford consistently emphasizes and examines gender and how each respective community used rodeo to define its own identity to meet its own needs. The study itself is concise and direct, with sufficient notes and sources. To wit, the Great Plains Indian Rodeo Association, with three-quarters of its 2015 executive membership comprised of women (106), certainly has dismissed many stereotypes. Ford also states that the involvement of diverse peoples in a “White, masculine, and heterosexual American event” (15–16) provided the opportunity for “others” to expand thought and understanding of the American West and its cultural meaning. Through comparative, intersectional analysis of race, gender, and sexuality, her study is a cultural history exploring “rodeo as something beyond a basic competitive environment” (3). Thanks to Elyssa Ford’s Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion, we now see the West as it was in the Great Plains more clearly: populated by people of color with a firm sense of belonging to America regardless of demographic identity, and more populated by women and diverse sexuality than society has been taught.įord argues rodeo itself as a “site of cultural history” with tremendous meaning and significance for Mexican, Hawai‘ian, Native American, Black, and LGBTQ groups. ![]() The facts, specifically within rodeo itself, are much more complex and diverse. Popular versions of the American West stylized in twentieth-century multimedia have had pop-culture consumers believing the West was mostly White.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |