Few things have captured the American imagination as much as the Wild West. A fixture of American pop culture, the Western genre had its earliest milestones in the first years of the 20th century with the publication of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian in 1902 and the debut of the film The Great Train Robbery...

By the mid-nineteenth century, both Glasgow, Scotland and Manchester, England were producing huge numbers of bandannas, printed cotton handkerchiefs imitating earlier tie-died silk handkerchiefs from India. The success of that industry was the result of perfecting two chemical processes: the so-called Turkey Red process for dying cotton a brilliant, washable red, and discharge printing, a...