The History of Black Hats, White Hats, And Villains

(via Atlas Obscura) In the fictional American West, good and evil were not so clearcut. Go digging into the history of black hats vs. white hats, and you’ll find that good guys wore black, bad guys wore white. “There is no trope or consistency in who wears white or black,” says Peter Stanfield, who’s studied the B-westerns of the 1930s. The black vs. white dichotomy was never quite so clean as it’s now remembered.