[nativestudies-l] 11/15 lecture: Hampton Sides on Kit Carson

[Alyssa Mt. Pleasant]

*The Howard R. Lamar Center at Yale University
Presents Author Hampton Sides
*
  **
>
> Emacs! 
>
* *
*Kit Carson: National Hero.
Genocidal Maniac. (Pick one)
*
 
Date and Time: Thursday, November 15 at 5:30 pm
Place:  101 Linsly-Chittenden Hall (61 High Street)
Free and open to the public
 
Hampton Sides brings the history of the American conquest of the West to 
life. At the center of his book stands the remarkable figure of Kit 
Carson--the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the 
contradictions and ambiguities of the American experience in the West. 
Carson's exploits made him a household name when they were written up in 
pulp novels known as
blood-and-thunders"; yet Carson himself, after reading a biography based 
on memoirs he had dictated, is said to have remarked that the author 
"had laid it on a leetle too thick."

As one reviewer of the book has noted, "Carson was the consummate 
frontiersman....Illiterate but fluent in five Indian languages as well 
as Spanish, he'd had two Native American wives before marrying into an 
old Spanish family from Taos. Carson, who seems often to have been at 
the right place at the right (or wrong) time, had a deep understanding 
of the complex clash of cultures taking place.... In Sides's depiction, 
Carson was a humble loner who became an unflinching killer when 
circumstances or superiors demanded it."

Author Hampton Sides will give a talk drawn from his national 
bestseller,/ Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West/ 
(Doubleday), now out in paperback.

For more information, please call 203-432-2328 or email 
lamar.center at yale.edu.

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