Gwyn Hervochon and Alessandro Meregaglia, archivists at Albertsons Library, recently had their article, “‘All Stories TRUE!’: The Nonfiction Western Magazine Collection at Boise State University,” published in the open access journal, The Reading Room: A Journal of Special Collections.
The article describes the genre of specialized magazines known as “nonfiction western magazines.” These magazines focused on telling stories about the “Old West” – the 19th century Western United States. Joe Small founded the genre’s first magazine, True West, in 1953. Over the next 30 years, the magazine’s popularity increased and dozens of imitators were published.
Hervochon’s and Meregaglia’s article discusses the rise and decline of these magazines and also explores the magazines’ usefulness both as a source of western American history and as cultural artifacts themselves to study how people perceived the “Old West” during the period in which they were published.
Read the article: https://readingroom.lib.buffalo.edu/PDF/vol4-issue1/all-stories-true.pdf