In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Italy re-invented a genre that had been seen as dead or dying: the Western. At the time, spaghetti Westerns were seen as derivative and "mere" entertainment, but a critical consensus has emerged since that the genre helped to define a new kind of masculinity in action cinema; it was profoundly engaged with radical politics that saw violent revolution as the only way forward; and it articulated a different attitude toward history, one largely free of nostalgia, than that of the traditional, Hollywood Western.

No knowledge of Italian needed; two 7-8 page papers.