Horizon and The West According to Kevin Costner
What to Kevin Costner is The West? is probably the kind of paper I should have written in graduate school had I known then the twists and turns my career would take thanks to you all.1 But’s a real question worth asking. The longer I go down this road the more it becomes apparent that the vast majority of the population derives its understanding of the past more through popular culture than via academic works. Obviously academic works are super important—have you seen the Murderer’s Row of guests we’ve had—but things are as they are. So let’s embrace that. And maybe no one outside of Taylor Sheridan is talking more (or at least as loudly) about the West than Kevin Costner.
You may have heard by now that Horizon: An American Saga’s first installment did not do well at the box office during its first week. That doesn’t concern me. We are in a weird time period after COVID and during an inflation which drives up the cost of theater attendance all the while social media has whittled audience attention spans down to almost nothing. The Godfather would struggle in theaters right now. The point is that immediate box office returns don’t really tell us a lot about a film’s longevity, especially when studios have trained folks to wait to watch the movie from home on their 70-inch televisions.
But I take Costner seriously. It is obvious that he has a love of The West, whatever that may be. And while maybe we think of him as a Baseball Guy- I think looking at his career we need to start thinking about him perhaps in the pantheon of stars like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Sam Elliott.2 Think I’m crazy? Think again. Look at his body of work, starting with Silverado in 1985 (such a fun movie), Dances with Wolves in 1990 (the film that ratcheted our attention spans West), the overshadowed Wyatt Earp (1994), the aqua-western Waterworld (1995), the futuro-western The Postman (1997), the outstanding Open Range (2003), along with Hatfields & McCoys (2012), and perhaps now most famously Yellowstone (2018-present). The man is putting in the work and definitely has something to say about The West.
But what exactly is Kevin Costner trying to tell us? For that I brought in two amazing scholars of the West in Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter to talk not only about Horizon, but about Costner’s career thus far. We get into all of that, plus the cocktail the Megan made us make before we got started. Here’s an excerpt of Megan and Kate digging in:
This pod is fast-paced, electric, and takes zero prisoners. I hope you like it.
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About our guests:
Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast.And starting in September, she will be the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. While she is there, she will be finishing her new book, “The Westerners: The Creation of America’s Most Iconic Region.” She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022. She is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, and have written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.3
Kate Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications, photographs and videos created by storm chasers, popular culture, and oral histories to examine how both professional meteorologists and weather enthusiasts created a community that became central both to our understanding of severe storms and to the cultural identity of the Great Plains.
Kate holds a 2023-2024 Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. From 2022-2023, her work was supported by the Graduate Fellowship in the History of Science from the American Meteorological Society, and in 2021-2022 she held the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Research Fellowship in the History of Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma History of Science. She has also been awarded travel fellowships including the Andrew W. Mellon Travel Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma, the Summer Dissertation Grant from the Princeton American Studies program, and two awards with outstanding merit from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Women’s Council Graduate Assistance Fund.4
Kate also as a terrific podcast where she talks with amazing scholars about the production of history. You can find Drafting the Past right here:
https://draftingthepast.com/
So we’ve had a big week here at HATM and we have more to go. Don’t forget that we are doing Return of the Jedi at 8pm eastern Sunday for our sixth birthday. It’s gonna be a blast.
And if you get a chance, check out our YouTube page. Once we get to 500 subscribers, we’ll be able to start attaching some things that will help us advertise and grow. We’ll also have this pod available on that page sometime Thursday afternoon if you prefer to get your pods there.
In the meantime, thanks for being here and being part of the HATM community.
Jason
In reality, my master’s advisor would have loved it while my doctoral advisor hated it. You can imagine which of those programs was more welcoming.
Yes, this footnote is for you.
Side note: every time I hang out with Megan, I feel like I’m hanging with the older sister whose level of coolness I can never hope to replicate. My guess is that everyone feels this way.
Side note on Kate: she’s coming back to the pod to do Twisters soon and when you listen to this one, you’ll know why I’m excited about that. She’s awesome on the mic.
Headed to your YouTube to subscribe now 👍