英美文化概论论文In the past few weeks, we spent 10 lessons on essentials of British & American cultures study. In this course, we learn in brief about the history and government system etc. During the Learning process, what impresses me most is the cowboys.An integral part of the story of America, the cowboy is a national icon, a romantic, rugged metaphor for America’s frontier past, Westward expansion and creation myths. Sensationalizedby Hollywood and by real-life bad boys, the heroic, hard-working, hard-riding, free-thinking cowboy is inseparable from American history itself.America’s first cowboys came from Mexico. Beginning in the 1500s, vaqueros—the Spanish term for “cowboy”—were hired by ranchersto drive and tend to livestockbetween Mexico and what is now New Mexico and Texas. During the early 1800s, and leading up to Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836, the number of English speaking settlers in the area increased. These American settlers took their cues from the vaquero culture, borrowing clothing styles and vocabulary and learning how to drive their cattle in the same way.The vaquero influence persisted throughout the 1800s. Cowboys came from a variety of backgrounds, and included European immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans and Midwestern and Southern settlers. In the nineteenth century, one out of three American cowboys in the south was Mexican.As America built railroads further and further west, fostering industry, transportation and white settlements in former Indian territories, the cowboy played a crucial part in the nation’s expansion. In the early 1800s, Texas cattleman had herded cows via the Shawnee Trail to cattle markets in St. Louis and Kansas City. During the 1860s and following the Civil War, they began herding via the Chisholm and Western Trails towards the new railroads in Kansas, where livestock was then loaded into freight cars and transported to markets around the country.In less than two decades cowboys herded more than six million cows and steers to the railroads. Most cowboys were young—the average age was 24—and hard-working men in need of quick cash, although the pay was low. The work was exhausting and lonely. Cowboys also helped establish towns, spending their money in the “cowtown” settlements across the wes t during their time off. Townspeople frowned oncowboys as lawless troublemakers who brought nothing but violence and immorality, and some even banned them from town.Ranching, or the raising of cattle or other livestock on range land, also expanded during the late nineteenth century. The forced removal of Native Americans and the clearing of the American frontier resulted in the near extinction of the region’s many buffalo and bison. This land, now dominated by white homesteaders, was used for ranching.Public lands on the Great Plains constituted “open range,” where any white settler could buy and raise cattle for grazing. The invention and distribution of barbed wire in the 1870s revolutionized the concept of privately owned land in the Midwest, fencing off homesteads suitable for farming and ranching—but also limiting the work to be done by cowboys.With the rise of private landholdings in the late 1800s, the cattle driving industry had lost its cachet. Private landowners and “free grazers”—vaqueros and cowboys alike—locked horns over what was appropriate use for land whose ownership was also in question. By the 1890s, the wide open ranges and cattle trails were gone and privatized, and the days of the long cattle drives tothe railroads were over.Smaller-scale cattle drives continued until the mid-1900s, with livestock herded from Arizona to New Mexico and throughout the southwestern United States. Most cowboys left the open trail and took jobs at one of the myriad of private ranches that were settling across the West. But as the work of actual cowboys declined in the U.S., the cowboy lifestyle continued to be popularized—and stereotyped—by a new Hollywood film genre: the Western movie.The late 1900s were tough times for cowboys, ranchers, farmers and anyone working with the land in the U.S. Changing modes of food distribution and production, widespread urbanization and severe economic difficulties forced many to sell their land, go bankrupt, change professions, or take out large loans. As Vern Sager says in The Last Cowboy, “Don’t seem quite fair. A person works hard to make a little and gives it to the bank.”Cowboys in the 21st century might seem like an anachronism, but as Sager demonstrates, their work still needs to be done. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, cowboys—included in the occupation category “support activities for animal production”—numbered 9,730 workers in 2003, making an average of $19,340 per year, working in ranches, stockyards and rodeos. About one-third of these worke rs were listed in the subcategory of “spectator sports,” making their living primarily at rodeos, circuses and theatrical venues as livestock handlers.As the ranchers and cowboys of Sager’s generation age, who will be left to do their jobs? Despite decade s of socioeconomic change, cowboys still don’t have health insurance—and they don’t retire. Times might be changing, but as a symbol of persistence, self-sufficiency and a hard work ethic, cowboys live on.。