Buffalo Bill will be put in transatlantic context when historians from Montana State University and the Netherlands team up to present a free public lecture on the showman Wednesday, Sept. 24, in Bozeman.

MSU professor Robert Rydell and Utrecht University professor Rob Kroes will discuss “Buffalo Bill in Bologna and Beyond” from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Baxter Hotel at 105 W. Main St.

William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, and his Wild West troupe toured England and Europe several times between 1887 and 1906. The show appeared twice in cities and towns across Italy. Buffalo Bill played the Vatican in 1890, and a delegation of his performers met with Pope Leo XIII. He was the hit of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 and of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1889. By 1906, when the Wild West show returned to Bologna, Italy, Cody was no stranger to Europeans.

But how Europeans understood his show remains a puzzle, according to Rydell and Kroes who wrote the 2005 book, “Buffalo Bill and Bologna.” In it, the co-authors used the show to address the broader issues of the Americanization of Europe or, perhaps more accurately, the Europeanization of the idea of America by Europeans.

In their Bozeman lecture, Rydell and Kroes will reflect on the show’s significance, especially for the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific worlds. The Wild West shows always featured cowboys and Indians, but what is often overlooked is that the show also featured performers from Russia, Japan, South America and the Middle East. By the end of Buffalo Bill’s career, when he joined forces with another showman, Pawnee Bill, the show was billed as the “Far East and Far West.”

“Was this show just for fun?” the professors ask. “Or, should it be taken more seriously as a form of public diplomacy?”

In their lecture, Rydell and Kroes will examine how the Wild West show turned the American West into the center of the universe and how the show shaped American views of Europe and European views of America. The lecture will carry the story of the Wild West from the American frontier to “Downton Abbey,” into the world occupied by King Leopold’s ghost, and into the world of empire building in Europe and the United States.

The lecture is the keynote address for the 2014 Michael P. Malone Conference held to honor the memory of Mike Malone, one of Montana’s most distinguished historians and the former president of MSU.

Sponsors: The Michael P. Malone Professor Endowment, MSU Foundation, The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., the MSU Vice President for Research, The Office of the Provost, The College of Letters and Science, the Department of History Philosophy and Religious Studies, and the MSU Humanities Institute.

For more information, email history@montana.edu.