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Event Series Brown Bag

Brown Bag Lunch Series: Playing Cowboy

Since there have been children in what is now called the American West, toys have been part of their lives. These toys often helped them “become” someone else: a brave warrior, a tough cowboy, a lawman, an outlaw. With the publication of the first dime novels and the worldwide tours of Wild West shows in the …

Date with the Duke: North to Alaska

John Wayne and Stewart Granger strike it rich in this rousing comedy adventure set during the Alaskan gold rush. When prospectors Sam McCord (Wayne) and George Pratt (Granger) hit the mother lode, Sam agrees to go to Seattle to bring George’s sweetheart back to Alaska. But since she’s married to someone else, Sam invites a …

Event Series BookClub

Read the West Book Club: Lonesome Dove

The Pulitzer Prize­–winning American classic of the American West follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. A love story, an adventure and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove …

Event Series Brown Bag

Brown Bag: Exploring Comics

Comic books emerged in the 1930s. Through a natural evolution, cartoons developed into comic books, first through publications containing compilations of cartoon re-prints, then as books which featured unique content. Superheroes entered the world of comic books soon after, with many of the characters having stood the test of time to become vital parts of pop culture. Join Dexter Nelson …

Curator Conversation: The Dutch Oven

Dutch ovens were used on cattle drives to feed the cowboys and are still used today by chuck wagon cooks. However, these cast iron pots have a much deeper history. Join Luann Sewell Waters, state co-coordinator of the Oklahoma Leopold Education Project, conservation and history educator and Dutch oven cooking instructor as she shares the …

Read the West Book Club: The Big Sky

Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Big Sky is the first of A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides and explorers. The story …

Curator Conversation: Fraser’s Lincoln and Public Art Today

Join Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art Michael Grauer and Amena Butler, Studio School Assistant, Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, as they discuss James Earle Fraser’s Abraham Lincoln sculpture on exhibit at the National Cowboy Museum. Grauer and Butler will discuss Lincoln from an art history perspective and the impact public art can have on …

Read the West Book Club: All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses is the first volume in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. This National Book Awards winner for fiction tells the tale of John Grady Cole, who at 16 finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With …

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