J.B. Spins

Nikolai Gogol intentionally ended his 1842 novel mid-sentence, which probably appealed to a rule-breaker like prominent micro-indie filmmake...

There was a time when you could easily find paperback westerns written by Harry Whittington in most drug stores and supermarkets. Unfortunat...

It turns out Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family had it easy. This homesteading mother must contend with viral-rage-zombies, cannibals, and over-z...

Pandora is a frontier widow. That means she is a survivor, by definition. The homestead she shares with her willful teen daughter Hester loo...

Nobody cowboys harder than Jonah Hex. The scarred bounty-hunter is so hardnosed, it is practically a super-power. The live-action movie did ...

What is the representative national food of Finland? Ruisleipa rye bread? Does that make this a Ruisleipa Western? Regardless, even though i...

There was no shortage of violence in the Old West, but there was also a lot of quiet loneliness. There are plenty of both in Viggo Mortensen...

There is a relatively new trope in revisionist Westerns, in which a grizzled gunslinger blows into a town founded by freedmen that exudes co...

They were the great did-they-or-didn’t-they question of the Old West. There have always been plenty of stories that claim Calamity Jane (Mar...

For the American Buffalo, Miller was a one-man extinction event. Somehow, the species survived him, but it was not for a lack of bloodlust. ...

You can take the kid out of the tent revival, but you can’t take the tent revival out of the kid. Lord knows, Johnny Black tried. Like all l...

Mo Washington is part “Little Joe” Monahan (who was the inspiration for the Suzy Amis western, The Ballad of Little Jo ) and part Mary Field...

Did make sense for the post-monarchy Hawaiian government to quarantine indigenous leprosy patients at the colony on Molokai, despite the dis...

Maybe Willie Boy was here longer than we were led to believe. He died at the end of the Robert Redford revisionist western, but his legend s...

It is often referred to as a Spaghetti western, but since it was filmed in Spain by a British director, there must be some Manchego and Stil...

Isaac Lemay has been cursed by a tribal elder, who has apparently read his Sophocles. The old man actually called it a prophecy, but the way...

You might be surprised how many westerns were filmed in Spain, particular a number of classics generally described as being of the “Spaghett...

Technically, England stayed neutral during the American Civil War, but they were super interested, as we know from The Education of Henry Ad...

She is one of the best-known figures of the Idaho Gold Rush era, but even her name is a matter of contention. She started life as Lalu...

No period of American history is as vilified in popular culture as the days of the Western Frontier, but not for reasons usually stated. ...