Blake Allmendinger sku-653660540 All Books: Personas

Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West is a hardcover by Blake Allmendinger, listed in All Books as sku-653660540. It examines how people in the American West during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries used public performance, impersonation, deception and fraud to change their identities as the region changed.

The book relates those changes to the arts, land ownership, scientific exploration, definitions of race, gender and sexual orientation, and relations between the United States and other countries. Alongside Clarence King and Willa Cather, it discusses Isadora Duncan, founder of modern American dance; Polish actress Helena Modjeska; Karl May, described as Adolf Hitler's favorite author; Japanese poet Yone Noguchi; Sylvester Long, a mixed-race star of Native American silent films whose mother was born into slavery; and the perpetrator of what the source calls the greatest land grant hoax in U.S. history.

Allmendinger focuses on artists, dancers, film stars, con men and criminals, adding their often sad accounts of self-transformation to scholarship on the West's environmental, demographic and economic changes.