Hello r/AskHistorians, I’m Nancy Reagin, a European historian of gender and popular culture, and my most recent book is Re-living the American Frontier: Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900. Related to that, I’ve also edited a series of historical readers’ companions for a variety of fantasy and science fiction series.
Fandoms emerged alongside the rise of pulp fiction and mass commercial entertainments during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries; the word “fandom” was first used in print in 1903. Although fan communities emerged around sports teams, film and music celebrities, and other commercial entertainments, I am most interested in the development of literary fandoms and (sometimes linked to or overlapping) historically-focused fandoms during the 20th century, and their transition to online communities after the 1980s. Early literary fandoms grew around pulp fiction genres, including detective fiction (especially the Sherlock Holmes stories), science fiction, and Westerns. In these groups, fans participated in many ways; parsing and analyzing their “canon”; recreating scenes and artifacts from the stories; publishing essays and stories that reframed and retold the original stories; creating fan art in a wide variety of media. In each case, their communities used new media formats that emerged in later decades, but also altered and adapted in ways that reflected broader social and political changes. In writing my book, I narrowed my focus to the fandoms rooted in one type of genre literature (Westerns), but these communities show many parallels to other literary fandoms.
Re-Living the American Frontier asks: why have the historic and mythic elements of the Old West exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years; how have fans used, understood, and repurposed stories and artifacts set in that historic world; and how did their fandoms alter over time, reflecting political and social change? My book discusses the differences and similarities in how white Americans and Europeans saw the West and Indigenous cultures, and the fan communities that they built around Western stories, particularly those of best-selling German author Karl May and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In both Germany and the U.S., Western historical narratives based on what was seen as the “inevitability” of white colonial settlement were once seen as “apolitical,” and were central to most white Americans’ understanding of their nation’s history. But over time, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed, seen and used very differently by authorities during the Nazi period in Germany, and in East Germany after 1945. During the late twentieth century, academic and popular understandings of the West changed again, as the violence of white settlement and displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in culture wars in the United States, while Indigenous resurgence and activism affected European fans as well. In both the United States and Europe, popular understandings of the history of the West changed yet again, as Western fans negotiated and responded to a shifting cultural terrain, and the gradual decline in Westerns’ popularity.
Things you might be interested to ask about:
- The history of Western entertainments in the 19th and 20th centuries; the ways in which Western entertainments shaped white Americans’ understanding of their national identity and history; differences in how Germans and Americans understood Indigenous cultures; the biographies and fictional worlds of Karl May and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the fan communities that formed around each author; the growth of Western historical reenactment in Germany before 1939; how Western fans and reenactors had to adapt to very different political environments in Nazi Germany and East Germany; how new media forms, like blockbuster films, affected Western fandoms; how Indigenous activists engaged with, and sometimes challenged, white Western fans in both Germany and America; how Western fans in both nations have responded to changes in how academic historians and popular culture understand white colonial settlement of the West and its impact on Indigenous peoples; and why many East German Western reenactors chose to switch to Civil War reenactment after Germany’s reunification.
Things I might be able to answer but are outside my primary area of expertise:
- the history of other fandoms of genre fiction, particularly science fiction and the Sherlock Holmes stories; the global growth of varied forms of historical reenactment before and after World War II; how public history has expanded since 1945 to include varying forms of reenactment, including “living history,” open air museums, and experimental archeology; hobbyist historical reenactment.
Finally, if you are interested in a copy of Re-Living the American Frontier, academic press books are expensive, but I can offer a discount code for mine. If you’re interested, go here and use the code FANS40:
Ok, enough intro text. Ask away!
Edit: 3:17 p.m. This has been a lot of fun, and I want to thank the mods for inviting me to do this, and making everything run so smoothly. So many of the questions here have been smart, and pointed out things that I want to think more about. I couldn't answer every query, but I hope that my responses were helpful and interesting for some of you.
--- Nancy Reagin (twitter @ NReagin)
I'll let more insightful people ask hard hitting Qs and just ask - how often do you have to clarify "no, it's not spelled like the former First Lady?"
A great pleasure to have you with us, Doctor Reagin!
Over here in the Philippines, our school history classes start including Manifest Destiny when we get to the American colonial period. Is the Philippines much covered in the fandoms you study? If so, how are we portrayed in such?
Also, since it's right there and it caught my interest, why did many East German Western reenactors chose to switch to Civil War reenactment after Germany’s reunification?
Did this fascination help fuel German settlement in places in the West like the northern Great Plains and Texas (instead of the relatively less German influenced Colorado & New Mexico)
Or did german settlers sending letters back to Germany feed the fascination of the West to their families back home?
A bit of the chicken or the egg question.
I'm in Canada, and we had some relatives from Germany visit in the 1990s. They were very eager to meet some First Nations people, but were then disappointed that they were dressed like everyone else and lived in modern housing. Did representations of North American First Nations in Germany never progress beyond Karl May or were my cousins just ignorant?
My book discusses the differences and similarities in how white Americans and Europeans saw the West and Indigenous cultures, and the fan communities that they built around Western stories, particularly those of best-selling German author Karl May and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I too grew up in Europe reading these books, as well as their Dutch knock-off equivalents. But by the 80s, the impression I got was that Dutch children in my age group got most of their perception and understanding of the "wild west" from the (French) Lucky Luke comic books, which were incredibly popular. I was seen as a bit odd for reading the old-fashioned Laura and Old Shatterhand novels.
So my first question is: Did you study the influence of these comics on European perceptions in the post WW2 era? (I have no idea if these comics were popular in the US.) Or did these come too late to be covered by your research?
My book discusses the differences and similarities in how white Americans and Europeans saw the West and Indigenous cultures
My second question is if you could elaborate a bit on these differences and similarities. My personal recollection is that as a child I read these books vaguely rooting for the Amerian Indian characters, which were often depicted in a kind of "noble savage" cliché way and seemed to be the underdogs. but I have no idea if that was a typical reaction, and if that was the same in Europe and the US or not.
Can you talk about how this variety of Americana fandom continued to exist in the DDR? Was there a halt / crackdown in the Stalinist period, like with jazz in Poland? Were these fandom groups exclusively private or did the state sponsor any of them? What were the demographics of this type of fandom? Was it mostly young, university educated people, or was there a rural component as well? What were the boundaries of acceptability determined by the state? For example, given the gun culture associated with the American west, were weapons allowed as props, or were there shooting clubs, etc?
I know that Wild West touring shows (Buffalo Bill Cody’s in particular, but presumably others as well) toured in Europe in the late 19th century. How were those types of shows received by Europeans? Was there already interest in the American West or were those traveling shows the beginning point? And if there was already an interest, where did it come from? Thank you in advance!
Thank you for doing an AMA Dr. Reagin!
I studied in Germany several years ago during Karneval, and I was surprised to see ethnic Germans wearing "Native American" costumes in a parade. In the United States, I feel like there has been a discussion and general acknowledgement that white Americans should not be dressing up as Native Americans as costumes. I was wondering if there have been similar types of discussions occurring in Germany?
Thanks for joining us, Dr. Reagin!
Since you offered it up as a potential topic, I'd love to hear about how Indigenous people have responded to US and German reenactment and fetishization of their culture, and if indeed their interaction might not be best described by a more active word than "reacted".
I also wondered, as someone interested in historical reenactment myself (and who wears a lot of vintage clothing), if you could shed any light on what the US and German reenactors have thought about reenactment philosophically and if that's evolved at all. In the WWII reenacting community, I've seen first-hand, there's a lot of talk of "respecting the guys" (yes, almost always "guys") who fought in the war, honoring their sacrifices and supposedly gaining a better historical understanding of their experience by experiencing similar physical hardship, when in fact there's always been an underlying element of wanting to go out and play soldier in some fun clothes in the woods with your friends for a weekend. (Not even going to touch on how worrying it is to hear things like that from the US reenactors playing the Germans.)
So what I wonder, then, is whether Western reenactors in the US and Germany make similar claims to authenticity? To they see their practice as a way of "doing history", of similar validity to actual historical analysis, the way WWII reenactors often do? What does "authenticity" look like to Western reenactors, and is attaining "authenticity", material or otherwise, supposed to generate an intimate understanding of the past in the same way WWII reenactors claim?
What are your favorite fictional/historical fiction westerns?
It's a privilege and honor that you're taken time to talk to us. Thank you so very much.
So, I know that China is outside of your expertise, but I was curious more about a general phenomenon I've seen occur in things like the Three Body Problem and more pop-cultural, Star Wars, where I've seen 2 seemingly disparate and interrelated philosophies and cultural mainstays blend and meld together, as if they were always a part of one another.
So, my question is: when a work of fiction gains a fandom in a new area or culture that may have some pretty significant cultural gaps from its origins, how are these stories able to form connections with fans in the new region or culture, and what are some of the reasons they don't?
To add on to that, how can things that the fandom in the new area or culture add to the original work that can then influence both the author and fandom where it was created? Also, what can prevent these new interpretations also fail to resonate?
Thank you for this AMA!
Since you mention the post-reunification transition of German Western reenactors toward American Civil War reenactment, I'm very interested in your thoughts on a disturbing and incendiary claim that Professor Wolfgang Hochbruck made about the motivations of some German reenactors who preferred to reenact the Confederate Army:
Wolfgang Hochbruck, a Professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg and a Union reenactor, is less charitable. "I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority," he told author Tony Horwitz. "They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists." It's an unsettling thought.
Could you respond to Professor Hochbruck's claim? Do "fantasies of racial superiority" and a suppressed desire to celebrate Nazi achievements motivate a significant part of the German Confederate reenactor community? Or is the motivation to be found elsewhere? Are there any points of connection between German Confederate reenactment and far-right politics? Does Germany's Cold War history of division (and the experience of the GDR) play a role here?
Thanks again for your time!
So, one of the most common images of the mythical wild west is the lone gunslinger wandering around the west. But I noticed, growing up on franco-belgian western comics, that this figure was commonly either used for comedy (Lucky Luke) or not used as the focus at all (Les Tuniques Bleues, Buddy Longway.) But at the same time, they are obviously rather central to spaghetti westerns. So I was wondering, have you noticed any big national differences between the US, Germany and perhaps some other countries, in how central the lone gunslinger figure was to their conception of the west and how he was depicted? And has this changed over time?
Thank you for doing this AMA! I've heard before that a lot of (white?) American stereotypes about Native people can be traced back to Tacitus' book "Germania" and ideas he had about Germanic peoples. Do German reenactors themselves see or draw similarities between the Indigenous-colonizer dynamic and the German-Roman dynamic?
In 2001 I moved to Russia, and there I met a group of Russian "Dakota" reenactors, found online versions of Russian-Dakota dictionaries, and heard my first live versions of pow-wow music. As a young Metis person this seemed very strange but cool as well - these guys had been to Dakota communities, and some looked the part even. It was trippy.
Do you know anything about the state of indigenous fandoms in Russia itself, and how that may have changed over time?
I work in media and fan studies though haven't looked at reenactment or historical hobbyists. It sounds fascinating and an area I need to read more on, thanks for doing this AMA!
My step-great grandmother was a huge Louie L’Amour fan.
Is it a fair assessment that L’Amour’s fandom has transcended generations—at least perhaps from the generation before Baby Boomers possibly to some of Gen X? Does he still have much of a fan base? A NY Times article from 1998 a decade after his death indicated he was still in print and in high circulation at that.
Edit: I apologize if this is out of your topic area. It seemed it may be close.
I've heard that Adolf Hitler was such a fan of Karl May's "Old Shatterhands" Westerns that he insisted people in his upper echelons should read (some of) them. Is that true, and what did others around him think of this insistence? Did Hitler make any known statements about how he felt this benefited or influenced any decisions in his government?
Do you have a next book project planned?
Thanks so much for coming by!
Two questions:
Every modern fandom has those members who complain when their media becomes too "corporate" or when creators try to "pander" to the "mainstream." Is this something that happened in early pulp and Western fandoms? Were long-time fans contemptuous of the Rathbone and Bruce Holmes films, or did Western fans bemoan the Disney-fication of the genre after the success of Davy Crockett?
This might be a bit out of field, but, speaking of Disney, it's common for theme parks to have a Western themed area. Most every park from the 1955 opening of Disneyland through the '70s seems to have one, with already established parks like Cedar Point adding their own during the two decades. Is there any connection between these parks and earlier traveling Western shows, reenactment groups, or living history museums? Does this type of entertainment attraction, in which visitors enter a comic book version of a frontier town, predate the '50s?
Have you had time to delve into "The Dawn of Everything", the Graeber/Wengrow collaboration? I've just started it myself. They seem to suggest that the effect of the American indigenous people on European thought is much larger than is usually admitted. I realize that was before 1900. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and will look into your works
I come from Oklahoma U.S. To what degree do you understand western films and books from authors like Louis L'Amour have an affect on the culture of the southern region? To what degree could it have affected religion? I apologize if the questions aren't the right kind I should be asking you. Thank you!
Was there an equivalent of "shipping" (where people fanfic characters into relationships) in the 1900s?
I guess a lot is being talked about to impact of Karl May’s work.
Hello Dr Reagin! I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how/if European notions of North American First Nation Indigeneity have influenced ideas about European Indigeneity, especially as seen in music groups like Wadruna or Heilung that utilize a shamanistic aesthetic that appears (to a Canadian like me) to be appropriating First Nations culture/traditions to reenact imagined Norse/Germanic traditions.
Hi! What do you think of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven?
Do you have any personal favorite examples of revisionist Western books, movies, or shows, etc?
Also, do you have any favorite examples of Western style stories not explicitly set in the 19th century American west? Where the atmosphere and concepts are adopted but with a different setting.
What is the future like for these topics and genres? Do you see them continuing to captivate audiences for the foreseeable future?
Thanks for this; as a USian, I was surprised but also fascinated when I learned about the phenomenon you write about.
Now, I'm surprised to learn about the East German Civil War reenactors. I would have supposed that would have happened in a slightly earlier moment. Can you talk about the connections between race and the Cold War in the context of German western historical reenactment? And how did these differences play out different across East and West Germany? Did those differences manifest differently across decades (for example, cold war contestations about Jim Crow versus Apartheid)?
LARP and reenactment share a lot of common features but a distinguishing feature of LARP is that there's an expectation it include some kind of in-character game element, from competitive athletic combat to unscripted intrigue. I won't pretend the line is super bright, but I think it's usually possible to categorize an activity as either LARP or reenactment. While LARPs come in all kinds of settings, western frontier LARPs are a small minority.
Why has western reenactment generally not included game elements? What's the history of cross pollination, or lack thereof, between the western reenactment and LARP fandoms?
Do you think that there's any particular time you can pinpoint where the popular view of Native Americans shifted from savages to "noble savages", or would this really depend on the country?
Australia and Canada, for instance, do not have the same romantic view of aboriginal people. Why do you think this is?
Another interesting observation is that many classic Westerns were filmed by Italians. Any thoughts on that?
This is a pretty simplistic question that's perhaps more of a linguist thing, but what's relative prevalence and history of the term "Fandom" vs "Fanbase"?
Growing up (I'm in my late 20's now, in the eastern US) I always heard the latter term, but then maybe around a decade ago the former seemed to become more prevalent for me. Wondering how representative that is or not!
Thank you for the opportunity, Doctor Reagin.
Just two simple question.
What is the date generally referred to as the end of the "American Old West" period? How can we establish that in a given year (or maybe in a day?) that era ended?
Since I am planning to write my bachelor thesis on a related topic there is surely no harm in asking somebody who is an expert in the field.
How is wealth portrayed in western related media, especially comics? Does the portrayel of rich people as antagonists outweigh positive portrayals? How are those types of characters (the oil baron, the big cattle rancher, the succesful shopowner, etc) recieved by general audiences and the fandom in relation to actualy existing people who might fit the same role in real life.
Hi. It's great to enter in contact with you, I am from the archipelago of Puerto Rico, majored in History, and continue learning? I am wondering, do you have anything on when the alcoholics anonomous first hot to Germany, a d what was its impact. Also, was there any remote support from German women to the ones in US who were the last standing in keeping prohibition active, and protecting women?