If you want to be like that about, what we think of as American “cowboy” culture only lasted 25-years or so, Civil War-ish to 1880-ish. Yet we treat it like it was a 100-year block of Western history.
Same with “pirates” or “medieval times” or “samurai japan.” Our popular conceptions about a lot of time periods are heavily compressed and tropified. Yeah some of them technically lasted for hundreds of years but we just pretend that swashbucklers, armored knights, and ninjas (and cowboys) were all happening around the same time and remained as we depict them for the entirety of their existences.
If you want to be like that about, what we think of as American “cowboy” culture only lasted 25-years or so, Civil War-ish to 1880-ish. Yet we treat it like it was a 100-year block of Western history.
Same with “pirates” or “medieval times” or “samurai japan.” Our popular conceptions about a lot of time periods are heavily compressed and tropified. Yeah some of them technically lasted for hundreds of years but we just pretend that swashbucklers, armored knights, and ninjas (and cowboys) were all happening around the same time and remained as we depict them for the entirety of their existences.