For an element so firmly fixed in American culture, the frontier myth is surprisingly flexible. How else to explain its having taken two such different guises in the twentieth century--the progressive, forward-looking politics of Rough Rider president Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative, old-fashioned character and Cold War politics of Ronald Reagan This is the conundrum at the heart of iCowboy Presidentsi, which explores the deployment and consequent transformation of the frontier myth by four U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. p Behind the shape-shifting of this myth, historian David A. Smith finds major events in American and world history that have made various aspects of the Old West frontier more relevant, and more useful, for promoting radically different political ideologies and agendas. And these divergent adaptations of frontier symbolism have altered the frontier myth. Theodore Roosevelt, with his vigorous pursuit of an