Tore Olsson leverages Red Dead Redemption 2 to dissect America's violent post-Civil War era, exposing how federal land grants fueled railroad monopolies while displacing dynamic Lakota societies. The discussion debunks the "Lost Cause" myth, tracing the 1890s resurgence of white supremacy through Confederate flag adoptions in Alabama and Florida, Jim Crow laws, and Nathan Bedford Forrest's KKK leadership. Olsson clarifies historical inaccuracies regarding the Klan's timeline and Lincoln's evolving stance on slavery, linking the Mexican-American War's territorial expansion to Civil War tensions. Ultimately, the episode argues that modern income inequality mirrors the Gilded Age, urging listeners to view race and class through a lens of systemic exploitation rather than isolated events. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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From Music to Video Games00:08:12
All right, Tori.
It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
It's a real pleasure to be here, Danny.
I'm excited to chat with you.
For people that aren't familiar with your work, why don't you give us a brief background in your studies and how you came about with this Red Dead Redemption story?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, my name is Tori Olson, and I am a professional historian.
I'm a history professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee.
And I work on modern American history, really the 150 years or so since the Civil War.
And I've always been really interested in pop culture as a way of telling histories.
When I teach my kind of big American history survey class at the University of Tennessee, I actually call it American History in 30 Pop Songs.
And we listen to at least one song for every lecture and analyze it and use music as a way to engage with the past, in part because it gets students emotionally excited and hooked on the topic.
And I started off with music, but then of course I got really interested in video games as a way to get people interested and enthusiastic about grappling with some really hard questions in American history.
And a lot of this stems from my own personal background, right?
Because even though I'm a serious academic historian, right?
This is my day job.
Before I became that, I was a kid growing up in 1990s America, and that kid really loved video games.
It was just the 1990s was a good moment to be playing a lot of video games.
Some really great franchises coming onto the market at that time.
And that's really what I cared about.
Like in high school, you know, sure, I did okay in my history classes, but I was really just enjoying playing StarCraft and Deus Ex at home.
Those are the kinds of things that really enthused me.
So I was a big gamer when I was a teenager.
But then when I got to college and got more serious about studies and all this, I really decided to leave video games behind.
I decided to take a break because it was not doing me any favors academically, right?
And I really took 20 years off from gaming, which is a long break.
Like, really, from 2000, when I started college, to 2020, when the pandemic hit, I really didn't play any video games at all.
I was just very devoted to becoming a professional.
Like, I was becoming, I went to graduate school to earn a PhD.
And then I started as a junior assistant professor at the University of Tennessee.
And, you know, I barely had any time to do anything other than work.
So, long hiatus from video games.
But then the pandemic rolls around.
It's got me confined indoors like the rest of us.
And I decided, hey, you know, why don't I reconnect with this old hobby of mine, video games?
And in the back of my head, I'm thinking, I bet the games look so much better now than they did in 2000.
And I was totally right about that.
They did look a lot better.
But they didn't just look better.
The video games that I started playing in the early pandemic also told much more nuanced and interesting and diverse stories, not just about life, but about history in particular.
So, one of the very first games that I picked up early in the pandemic, and I promise you, I picked this game up just for fun.
Like, there was no professional angle behind me doing this.
But one of the first games I picked up in the pandemic was Red Dead Redemption 2, in part because one of my colleagues, another historian, recommended it to me.
He said, Hey, you know, check out this game.
It's not stupid.
You know, that's actually high praise coming from a historian when it comes to like big pop culture.
Yes.
You know, a lot of time when pop culture engages history, it doesn't always do a good job at interpreting things.
Right.
So, I play this game just for fun.
And then, about 20 hours into the game, I realized that, whoa, this game really is not stupid.
I mean, of course, it's this fictionalized world where the names of characters and places are all made up.
But the game gestures really frequently to some of the really big dilemmas that historians spend years and years talking about things like the women's suffrage movement, like the expansion of major corporations in the late 19th century, the railroads, the meatpacking industry, the ranching industry.
And it engages things like the memory of the Civil War in the 1890s, like all these things that historians have always viewed as very serious, legitimate topics.
And then there's this blockbuster video game, Red Dead Redemption 2, that's introducing this topic to millions and millions of people around the world.
And to be sure, the game on its own doesn't really teach you all that much.
I mean, on its own, it's not an educational product, right?
It's not meant to educate you.
But it definitely is successful.
In sort of planting enthusiasm and curiosity in the heads of many millions of people.
So that was my idea, basically, 20 hours into this game.
Why don't I try teaching a class that uses this fictional world of the games really as a jumping off point to explore the actual big dilemmas of violence in the United States in that kind of crucial 1870 to 1920 period when the games are set?
So that was the basic idea, right?
Let's use this as a teaching tool.
Not to teach the fictional content of the game, that's not the point, but to teach the actual real history of this period using the kind of hook of the games to get students excited.
So I started that in 2021.
I'm very proud to say that it was the first, the world's first ever college history class that used the Red Dead Redemption games.
No one had done anything quite like this previously.
And the students loved it.
You say it is as a historian, a PhD in American history, right?
Yeah.
I mean, some parts are, right?
Like, not everything is.
Well, they obviously didn't need to make it super accurate historically, right?
To be successful.
But they did.
They went to a lot of work to make it very relevant to a lot of the.
They might not be like perfectly correlated on the timeline, right?
I think you say, but a lot of the events are very accurate and like a lot of the struggles and everything else that's going on, like racially and economically.
Yeah.
I mean, I think what the game succeeds at.
Best is capturing the sort of visual aesthetic look of this time period, whether it's New Orleans in 1899 or sort of one of these like a frontier cattle town in the West or the Southern Mountains.
I think they do a great deal.
They clearly studied photographs of this period quite closely and tried to recreate that.
So obviously, recreating the visual look of a place is important, but that alone is not accuracy.
You have to go beyond that.
The lived fabric of people's lives, you know, the kinds of things they care about, the things they talk about, the major issues that they're interested in.
And the game does pretty well with that, right?
I mean, they miss about as often as they hit on those questions.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Yeah, on its own, the game is not going to be your American history teacher.
But what I love about the game is that it's rich enough and accurate enough that with some accompaniment, with some help, it can actually be a really, really powerful tool for.
Engaging and learning American history, and like particularly engaging some of the biggest dilemmas that are not just historical but that really impact us today.
Right?
Dilemmas about capitalism and big business, dilemmas about race and inequality.
Basically, all the things we're talking about and fighting about today, you can learn a great deal by using this game and then having a little help on the side.
And that's really what my book is trying to do.
It's what my class has been trying to do, you know, to open a conversation about some difficult, often violent moments in American history through the use of this ridiculously popular video game.
It's also interesting that it was like one of the best selling video games in the first week, right?
Like it was a blockbuster hit.
Yeah.
This statistic will never cease to blow my mind.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Sales Record00:07:46
But in its Opening weekend back in, I think, late 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 sold more, it made more money in its opening weekend than any other entertainment product ever before had done in its opening weekend.
Oh, entertainment product.
Like movies, TV shows, Harry Potter books, whatever.
This game was bigger than anything previously.
That's like insane, right?
That's bizarre.
Well, it gestures at the meteoric rise that the video game industry has had in the last 10 years or so because today, the size of the video game industry is bigger than music.
And movies combined in terms of profits and proceeds.
And it's catching up with sports.
Like it's basically neck and neck with sports in terms of like, you know, a moneymaker.
Yeah, there's Fortnite players who have contracts the same size as Tom Brady's contracts.
Right, exactly, which is pretty wild.
So, yeah, this game has, you know, it's really become a juggernaut.
It's been, I mean, it's sold about, Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold about 61 million copies or so, last time I checked.
But if it's sold that many, I bet it's been played by.
200 million people, right?
By people watching on YouTube, by streamers, people watching their friends over someone else's shoulder, right?
I'm sure there's people who've pirated the game.
I mean, there's a lot of people who are engaging with this.
They're not just in the US, they're all over the world.
Have you ever had a conversation with any of the developers or any of the historians behind the creation of it now?
No.
Rockstar Games are very protective and secretive about their production process, and that's cool.
I respect that.
They also get in a lot of lawsuits, don't they?
Yeah, they've been engaged in quite a few.
I think one of them that you mentioned in your book was the Pinkertons.
Yeah, this is such a crazy story, right?
So it's fascinating.
So Red Dead Redemption 2 fictionalizes the names of almost everything, right?
The names of states are made up, the names of people are made up.
But then they retain one agency that they do not fictionalize at all, and that's the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
Yeah, why do they fictionalize all the states and geographical areas, do you think?
I mean, you know, so that no one is going to be.
Yeah, definitely not that.
I think so that they, you know, can kind of like wriggle their way out of this.
Accuracy and authenticity things.
Like, we never claim that this is North Dakota.
We never claim that this is Louisiana.
It allows them more creative liberties.
And I really respect that.
I think it works really well for the game.
And I think it follows the long trend of Grand Theft Auto, the main franchise created by Rockstar, which of course always engaged American cities, but also lightly fictionalized them.
So that Miami becomes Vice City, that Los Angeles or Southern California becomes San Andreas, and that sort of thing.
So it's a longstanding practice that they can kind of.
They can get away with more if they don't use real names, except for the Pinkertons, which they decide to include by name and have to confront this lawsuit, which ultimately goes nowhere because the Pinkertons, which still are around fascinatingly enough, they sue Rockstar saying that you're basically trashing our legacy, you're sullying our good name, none of this is true, except actually their portrayal is pretty accurate.
I mean, the timing is off by a little bit, but yeah, the Pinkertons of the late 19th century were indeed mercenaries for big business, trying to crack workers' skulls and break up strikes and Pursue bandits and outlaws and that sort of thing.
Basically, protect the status quo.
So, didn't they work for the federal government, though?
They weren't.
No, they were private actors.
They were private actors.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, companies would basically hire them if they wanted.
Like, the federal government would help big companies crack workers' skulls, too, to be sure.
But they were a little slower on the response.
Like, it might take them a couple days or weeks to show up.
The Pinkertons were known to be very reliable and showing up and using force effectively in a very cold and calculating way to stop workers from organizing, from unionizing, and things like that.
Yeah.
It's so the history of the United States is so wild how much stuff has been packed into what the last 200 years, how many historical events and how much this landscape has changed in 200 years.
And I think you said something I heard you say on another podcast that you used to go to a church in Sweden that was like a thousand years old.
And now you study this too.
You've dedicated your life to this 200 year period.
Yeah, for sure.
It's, you know, there's a lot has happened recently in the last 150 years in the US, and not just things have happened.
There's been a lot of conflict and a lot of violence, you know, and violence is something that's so central to my book and to my class.
Because, of course, Red Dead Redemption 2, like every rock star game, is a violent game.
I mean, like, you know, it's got absurd body counts.
So, those body counts are often inflated compared to what actually happened.
But the reality was that late 19th century America was a really violent place.
Not all parts of it, to be sure, but parts of it were really violent, like even violent by today's standards.
And so, I'm really interested in diving into, you know, what motivated that violence?
What animated that violence?
Because in the video game, it's kind of, it's not always random, but there's a lot of random encounters, right?
There's grudges, there's drunken poker games, there's sort of personal rivalries that animate much of the violence.
But yeah, there's like a famous clip, I think, that got a lot of shit or a lot of heat, or where this guy like lassoed a woman and like fettered alligators.
Yeah, so that's a really, I mean, that was an absolutely disgusting clip to be sure.
And it got Rockstar a lot of criticism.
People saying, oh, you know, the point of Red Dead Redemption 2 is to beat and kill feminists.
And the reality is that.
That's not actually the point of the game at all.
The game is very sympathetic in its treatment of women's liberation and women's suffrage activists.
But what the game does is, you know, it's an open world game.
You can do kind of whatever you want.
And the game presents feminists and suffragists all over the map, right?
And because it's an open world, you know, sandbox game, any troll on YouTube can do whatever they want, make a clip of it, and then share it with other assholes on the internet who can click it and like it, you know?
Right.
But does that mean that the The purpose of the game is to do that?
Of course not, right?
I mean, the storyline of Red Dead Redemption 2 is absolutely cuts in the complete opposite direction.
I love how you have the morality scale.
That's so fascinating.
Yeah.
It tells you how moral you are depending on what you do and the different types of actions that you take in the game.
Right, right.
Yeah.
It's this kind of linear scale of, you know, are you good or are you bad?
Right.
It works for the gameplay, but, you know, one.
When we're trying to understand actual gunslingers of this period, we really can't map them onto a simple good, bad, moral, and immoral scale.
So, what I do in my book, too, is look at the kind of real gunslingers who inspired people like Arthur Morgan, people like Wild Bill Hickok, and Jesse James, and folks like that.
They're not simply just good or bad.
There's like six axes that are all intersecting.
Right.
That's an interesting thing, too.
We were kind of touching on it before we started the podcast, but in history, people were just shittier.
The moral scale slid back so much farther, the farther back you got, right?
Like, people don't look at anything they look like the way we look at it today.
People did way more violent things, way more committed, way more atrocious crimes, and they weren't looked on the way they're looked on today, right?
People were just shittier assholes, right?
They're pretty shitty and violent today, though, too.
But no, I mean, I think that certainly there's differences in morality and stuff like that.
But I would push against an idea that it all used to be worse and it's only getting better, right?
Progress Is Not A Straight Line00:02:51
I think it goes up and down and back and forth.
It's really unpredictable.
You never know.
I'd love to believe.
That, like, the story of humanity is the story of forward progress and motion and you know, deeper sensitivity to life and all that.
But I don't know if I actually believe that.
Really?
Well, I don't know.
Just look back at the events of the 20th century and can we really understand that as like a march toward progress?
Look at World War II, you know, like 50 million people killed in this conflict.
Like, there's no war from the 13th century that leaves that many people dead, right?
Look at the Holocaust, look at like you know, global imperialism and colonialism, like these awfully toxic institutions that.
Trod on the lives of so many people, all in the name of progress and civilization and all this sort of thing.
So it's hard.
I mean, I'm not saying it's all downhill.
I'm not saying we all lived in, you know, a wonderful place before and then it's all kind of sliding down.
It's just, it goes up and down, back and forth.
There's no like linear, it's neither all going down or all going up.
Yeah, it's definitely not linear.
Yeah.
I mean, U.S. history is the same way, you know, like on classic questions like racial equality, you know, like there's moments when we have great progress and then we have moments when we walk backwards and then it's, you know, it's kind of like, Take two steps forward and then one back, and three steps forward.
The history definitely confounds simple tales of things getting better or things getting worse.
It's just a kind of mix of both.
So, what part is there one part of history specifically in your book, Red Dead's History, that you focus on?
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Yeah.
Well, so I really zoom in on this crucial.
Railroad Land Grants Explained00:02:31
50 year period after the Civil War.
Okay.
Like 1865 to 1920 or so.
And I think that's a moment that's, I mean, on one hand, from us, like in the 21st century, that seems like so distant, you know, like 130, 140 years ago.
What could that possibly tell us today?
But I genuinely believe that, like, this is the 50 year slice that we have to understand if we want to understand most of the crucial dilemmas that are dividing our society today.
Really?
Mainly because in that 50 year window, it is where the modern conversation about Racial equality starts, about what should the rights be of people of different racial backgrounds.
And in that moment, too, is when we see corporate capitalism fully transform American life.
Like you and I have grown up around massive companies that dominate our society, our economy, that are major employers that shape the political system and all that sort of thing.
We've kind of gotten used to that.
We've just taken that for granted.
Not Americans of the 1870s and 80s, because that's the first time they're really encountering companies that big.
Like that's the first time that they're encountering these juggernaut companies.
Corporations, the steel industry, the railroad industry, the meatpacking industry, and all these things.
And they are really very hesitant about it.
Like they are not accepting and embracing this.
I mean, some are the people who make a profit from it.
But most Americans are really skeptical of this transformation.
And many of them are going to fight back.
So if we want to understand the America of today, right, as I understand it, the two biggest dilemmas that we keep arguing and fighting about in this country are about capitalism and are about race.
Like those two conversations, those two fights are really shaped by that.
1865 to 1920 period.
Like, we can't understand today unless we really grapple with what went down in those foundational decades.
Yeah, I loved the part of your book where you said that during the Gilded Age of capitalism, I guess during the railroad boom, that there were so much, so many subsidies and federal funding for these giant corporations that it would have made Stalin jealous.
Yeah, I mean, the statistic that blows me away is that if you put together all the free land that was given by the federal government to Railroad corporations, like put it together into one state, like it's all over the country, but if you mass it all in one state, it would be the third largest state in the country after Texas and Alaska.
Just like land given by the government to corporations.
Native Peoples And The Bison00:15:20
Wow.
And then those corporations are going to have a completely different career as opposed to those who don't receive that.
So I made that joke about sort of Stalin would have been jealous in part because I think grappling with the history of capitalism in the late 19th century.
Really pushes against this myth that many Americans are attached to, which is that we live in a free enterprise, free market capitalist nation, right?
That we live in a country where we've really pushed the government out and that the free market decides everything.
And that is so not true for most of American history because government handouts, government supports, it really defined how capitalism worked and it stacked the deck in favor of some and against others.
So, you know, this is.
We definitely still see that today.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the government's still actively involved in so many different sectors.
But it was even more nakedly obvious in 1875 than it was, you know, than it is today.
So, and during this 50-year slice of history was also the biggest parts of the Indian Wars and, like, the massacres of the buffalo and pushing the Indians off their land.
Right.
I mean, you know, the story of struggles between white settlers and native peoples starts in, you know, the 15th and 1600s.
So it's been going on for a long time.
But in the West in particular, right, in the West, the kind of 15 years after the Civil War is when you see the most massive and chaotic encounters between the U.S. military and various native tribes.
Right.
In the Great Plains and places like that.
By this time, the native tribes had already gotten horses and guns.
Yeah, like several generations previously.
Like really, like during the 1700s is when you see.
During the 1700s, okay.
And this gets at another really important myth busting thing that this game and this book can do, which is.
Americans tell, they tend to tell very simple stories about native peoples in this country, right?
Whether those are good or bad stories, you know, sympathetic or unsympathetic, but they're very simple, right?
You know, the kind of simple good stories.
Oh, you know, native people are these brave folks, you know, who nobly defended themselves and their traditions against, you know, settlers.
And of course, it's a tragedy that they lost.
But, you know, that story, I mean, sure, the nobility of it might be right in some ways.
But native peoples, especially in the West, like in these places and decades that we often think of, you know, the Indian Wars, like the 1860s and 70s, those native societies were not static and traditional and unchanging.
They were actually totally different than they'd been 200 years earlier.
And it gets at precisely your question, Danny, about guns and horses, right?
Because, like, during the 1700s, guns and horses enter into many, particularly kind of Midwestern, Western, Great Plains native societies and totally changes the way that they live.
Like, before the guns and horses came into the story, they tended to be agricultural, settled, you know, kind of rooted in one place.
But once you get access to guns and to horses, they discovered that hunting is a much, much better way to subsist, or at least better for their desires.
And they become much more nomadic.
They move around a lot more and they're dependent on hunting, particularly the bison.
The bison had been used by native peoples for a long time before white settlers show up.
But when white settlers come to the West, it's at a moment when native peoples are unusually dependent upon it.
Why were they so dependent on them at that point, so much more dependent on them?
Well, because they're not practicing agriculture in the same extent.
I mean, there's a lot of diversity here.
But I'm thinking about groups like the Comanche in the southern Great Plains, like the Lakota in the northern Great Plains.
They're groups that really kind of decide, you know, we're going to leave a lot of settled agriculture behind and we're going to follow the hunt.
We're going to make the hunt one of the crucial foundations of our society.
Now, one of the reasons they decide to do that, not only because they have guns and horses and a way to hunt more effectively, is that there's unusually large bison populations at that time, right?
So, like the first half of the 19th century, the first half of the 1800s, is a moment when there's just way more bison than there had been before, in part because the weather was unusually good during this period.
So, like more rain means more grass, more grass means more bison.
So, you know, we need to get over ideas that.
Represent the West and especially native peoples in the West as just this kind of like static, unchanging, traditionalist people living as they'd always lived.
It's not true.
Like those societies are changing just as much as European settler societies coming in.
So it's just, you know, it's a very fascinating encounter between people who become much more dependent on the bison and then white settlers who come in saying, we want to get rid of the bison.
We want to eliminate the bison, make way for cattle.
And that was part of their strategy too, right?
Not just to make way for cattle, but to basically starve out the indigenous people.
Yeah.
And was there, how much.
I'm coming from a very ignorant perspective from the history of this stuff.
No need to apologize about that.
How much infighting was there, or how much fighting was there between the native tribes, like warring against each other?
Quite a bit.
Yeah.
I mean, I think romantically, we like to have this idea that native peoples, they all understood themselves as having a common indigenous identity, and that, of course, it makes sense that they would band together and resist white settlement and white intrusion.
And that's not, I mean, there comes a point when that happens, right?
But the 1860s and 70s is not a moment when that's happened.
So, like when the U.S. Army shows up on the northern Great Plains, the Crow and the Lakota are at war with each other, right?
So, neighbors that, you know, that share this area are warring with each other.
And this gets at, again, the diversity of native people.
They're not a homogenous mass.
They've always had different languages, different cultures, different customs.
And sometimes they came to blows over that as well.
And they were based geographically in like Texas, New Mexico.
Is that right?
They being like the Lakota and the.
Who was the other tribe?
Well, so the Comanche are around.
Comanche, yeah.
Comanche is like.
Texas, New Mexico, areas like that.
New Mexico, areas like that.
In my book, I discuss to a great extent the history of the Lakota in particular.
It was sometimes called the Sioux.
But Sioux is actually the name that their enemies called them.
To me, it's like, let's call them by the name that they call themselves by.
The reason why I focus on the Lakota quite a bit is because I'm almost certain that they are the real life inspiration behind this fictional native tribe that's portrayed in the game, who are called the Wapiti.
If you played long enough, it's kind of in the last third of the game that this manifests more.
I don't know if you got to that part, Danny.
It's almost certain that the developers at Rockstar modeled this fictional native nation after the real life Lakota, which were on the northern Great Plains, right?
So in places like South Dakota, the Dakotas, perhaps parts of Nebraska, if you go down that way.
So the Indian Wars were going on well after the Civil War ended.
Yeah.
And there was, I think, even some fights or some battles where the Indians would.
Would have won over the European settlers or what?
Yeah, I mean, the most famous one, I mean, it's the U.S. Army.
This is probably the U.S. Army, okay.
Yeah, who's pivoting from the Civil War, remember?
Right.
This is also happening before and during the Civil War.
Right, right, right.
But many of the most famous battles in the so called Indian Wars are Civil War U.S. Union commanders, people like William Tecumseh Sherman, George Sheridan, Philip Sheridan, I'm sorry, a lot of, I mean, George Custer.
Right?
The Custer's last name.
He's the one that lost a battle, right?
Exactly.
He's another one of these decorated, anti slavery U.S. commanders in the Civil War who then winds up in the Dakotas fighting native peoples.
And it's really kind of a tragic tale in many ways that many of these generals, like Sherman, for example, who makes Georgia howl, who helps defeat the Confederacy, they earn these high marks as kind of social justice crusaders during the Civil War because they're fighting against slavery, right?
Right.
But then in the years afterward, they go to fight a much less Morally clear crusade against native peoples.
I mean, it's actually very morally clear to me.
It's really nasty.
It's really disgusting.
Right.
And so the same people are involved in both, you know, and they didn't necessarily see contradictions between them.
I mean, some did, to be sure.
They're not all one mass.
But like to think about these Civil War heroes then becoming anti heroes or villains in the Indian Wars is, you know, one of the paradoxes of this period.
Right.
I mean, it also seems like after the North won the Civil War, they kind of gave up on, on, Protecting the rights of black people or anything else.
It seemed like they kind of backed away.
Like, oh, we won.
We don't really care.
Well, it depends.
Because they still thought of them as subhuman, right?
I think even Lincoln wrote a lot about that.
Like, he still believed that they didn't deserve to be equal to everyone else.
They didn't deserve to vote or anything like that.
He just wanted to abolish slavery.
That was it, right?
Well, it depends, right?
So, like, Lincoln is a character who changes a lot over his career.
So, if you check in with Lincoln, like, in 1860, when he runs for president and gets elected, he is not an anti slavery.
He's not an abolitionist.
He's not like, we need to remove slavery immediately.
However, by 1865, the last year of his life, that's what he does.
He literally abolishes slavery through the first Emancipation Proclamation and then through the 13th Amendment.
And so you might think, like, five years, how could someone change so much?
Well, the course of the war changes him and it changes a lot of Republicans, people of his party at that time as well, right?
Because he sees the ways that African Americans were so doggedly devoted to freedom and to assisting the United States in this cause.
Seeing their humanity, seeing their bravery, seeing their dedication to this struggle, that's what tilted him and many, many thousands of other white Northerners to be like, wow, we started this war to preserve the Union, but now we're fighting it by 1865 to destroy slavery permanently and forever.
So there's a real change in thinking on the part of these people.
It happened like mid war?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this is the craziest thing.
Early in the Civil War, Union U.S. troops would return escaped slaves.
Two southern plantations.
They're like, This is your property.
We're delivering it back to you.
So they're not trying to destroy slavery right away.
They're in fact maintaining it, in part because they're really cautiously watching these border states, places like Kentucky, places like Missouri that did not secede from the U.S., but these were places that had slavery.
So Lincoln is very careful not to lose those states.
He doesn't want to see them tilting into the Confederate camp.
So they really tiptoe around the question of slavery in the beginning.
They're like, We don't want to mess with this institution.
We just want to defeat the Confederacy and get the South back in the Union.
So they're But by the end of the war, that's not where they're at.
By the end of the war, they're really aggressively going against slavery as an institution.
That's interesting.
Yeah, and you mentioned earlier that in 1865, white Northerners kind of give up on the question of racial equality.
I wouldn't agree with that quite because in the decade or 15 years that follows comes Reconstruction.
Reconstruction is this fundamental turning point when the U.S., now that it's unified again, the U.S. government really tries to remake the South.
They pass some of the most important Important legislation that's still shaping our world today.
Now, I said earlier, right, that you can't understand race in America today if you don't understand that kind of moment after the Civil War.
And that's because the crucial constitutional amendments that shape our lives today were passed in that very period.
So, for example, the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment establishes birthright citizenship that if you are born in the United States, you are a U.S. citizen, right?
This is something that's being debated today regarding undocumented immigration and all sorts of things, right?
But it's passed in the midst of, and it's really passed to give black people in the United States.
It's part of Reconstruction.
It's part of this idealistic moment when the US tries to reform the South and really the whole nation in the wake of the Civil War.
The great sort of irony of Reconstruction, this period that really dates between 1865 or so and 1877, so roughly 12 years after the war, is that the United States wins the Civil War, but it kind of loses the peace in that it fails to achieve most of its goals with Reconstruction.
It accomplishes many of them, but the big picture is that the United States wins the Civil War, but it kind of loses the peace in that it fails to achieve most of its goals with Reconstruction.
When the South kind of returns to white domestic rule in the 1870s and 80s, there's a lot of similarities between.
I mean, slavery is gone, but white Southerners are now back in control and they kind of win the peace, even if they'd lost the war, which is one of the great ironies of the Civil War in many ways.
What do you mean by that, that last statement?
They lost the war, but they won the peace?
Yeah.
So white Southerners, the Confederacy is defeated in the Civil War, right?
That's inarguable.
But what they do is they win the terms of the peace by forcing the United States to back off from Reconstruction.
Because Reconstruction does two things, right?
It makes black people into citizens and it makes black men into voters.
It says, you know, black men can vote, right?
After 1870, that is official.
And that was revolutionary, right?
Because if you look at other societies that had slavery in the Americas, you know, Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, all these other places, they do not end slavery immediately and then make black men into full voters.
It takes a lot longer for that to happen.
So the U.S. goes like really quickly into that reform and, you know, extends democracy to, Black men, not women yet, right?
Women yet, right, but black men.
And what the South wins in terms of winning the peace is that it basically forces the United States government to back away from some of those promises about racial equality.
Okay.
And it won't be until the 1890s that they fully shut out black people from voting and from citizenship in many ways.
But because the US by 1877 has largely signaled that they're not going to really enforce these constitutional amendments from Reconstruction, it means that white Southerners.
They do win the peace in some regard.
They're able to preserve white supremacy, white control over Southern society in ways that Lincoln would have turned over in his grave to see, right?
Because this is not the desired outcome, to be sure.
Right, right.
Which you mentioned that it kind of changed for him during the Civil War.
Yeah.
And I'm sure that you witnessed.
Because what were the basic premise or the ideals that the Confederacy was fighting for?
For me and people that aren't super knowledgeable about this stuff, what were their values or their ideals that were behind their fight?
Right.
Well, there was one ideal above all others that motivated these elite white Southerners to secede from the U.S. and to create the Confederacy.
And that was to preserve a future for slavery.
That is really, I mean, you look at the documents of the people who create the Confederacy, like their founding statues, their speeches, and declarations.
They do not hide their motives.
They're like, we are creating a new republic based on the truth that the black man is subservient and lower than the white man.
Confederacy Ideals And Slavery00:16:06
They say this.
It's all in the documents.
But that's not what the U.S. was fighting for.
The U.S. begins the war fighting to preserve the Union.
To keep the Union.
Yeah, to keep the South from leaving, to keep the country together.
That's what the war begins as.
And then over the course of the war, it becomes a war against slavery and for some people, a war for racial equality.
Not everybody, right?
But enough people that they were able to push through.
These Reconstruction amendments.
So, the real, I mean, you know, this is so there's documents that you've read that basically they're saying that we're fighting for the future of slavery.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, the reason they left is because they were worried about the future of slavery, not just in the US, but potentially abroad, you know, in places in Latin America as well.
But see, this is the source of like a great deal of mythology.
Yeah.
Is this contested at all?
Not by any serious historian, but by a lot of people out there, right?
So, basically, as soon as the Civil War is over, Folks in the South, white folks in the South, begin creating this counter narrative that's basically helping them rationalize defeat, that's helping them make sense out of what happened.
And they're saying, you know what?
Since the war's over, slavery's been destroyed, right?
They don't want to say, well, we fought for this vicious, sinful cause and we got defeated.
Instead, as they claimed, we were doing it for states' rights.
So there comes out this counter narrative.
It's like the Civil War was not about slavery, it was about political principles and particularly about limited government.
And states' rights.
States' rights.
That states' rights have the power to choose and make decisions, not the federal government's, right?
So, this is a narrative that historians often call the lost cause.
And I have a whole chapter in my book about this, actually, because Red Dead Redemption 2 touches on this in really interesting ways.
So, it's this white counter narrative that the Civil War was not a sort of, you know, a racist defense of slavery, but it was a defense of truly American principles of small government and states' rights.
Now, the reason we know that this is total bullshit, which it really was, this has nothing to do with why the South actually seceded.
Actually seceded.
Let me give just two examples.
So in 1850, so this is 10 years before the Civil War breaks out.
In 1850, the South, the white South, pushes through this bill called the Fugitive Slave Act.
And the Fugitive Slave Act, what it basically did is it actually really strengthened the federal government to go and pursue escaped enslaved people across state lines.
It gives the federal government tons of muscle and power to like tread, walk all over state jurisdictions trying to.
Catch runaways.
Okay.
How is that state's rights?
That is literally the inverse of state's rights.
It is a defense of slavery, primarily.
By the federal government.
Well, by the U.S. government, of which the South is a part of, right, at that point in 1850.
So basically, they're saying, you know, hey, we want a muscular federal government when it protects slavery.
However, if it's critiquing slavery, now we don't like the government anymore.
This is an age old story in much of white Southern history.
So that's, you know, And some of the same people who push for this Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, there's some of the same people who are seceding in 1861, right?
So, like, they can't have states' rights in 1861 and federal government all powerful in 1850.
That doesn't make any sense.
No, that doesn't make any sense.
The other way we can know that this kind of states' rights, not slavery story is BS is let's actually look at the country they create.
Let's look at the Confederate States of America, right?
Which has its own constitution, has its own founding documents.
It's a really centralized government where the federal state has a lot of power in order to win this war, in order to protect slavery.
Right.
If they really believed in states' rights, wouldn't they practice what they preached, right?
Wouldn't they like really enact those ideals now that they have their own government?
And they don't.
Because, you know, see, this is a battle that, like, if you teach American history in the South, especially, but it's really around the country, you're going to confront a lot of students who say, Oh, you know, my parents told me the South didn't fight the war for slavery.
It's not about that, it's about states' rights.
And then I have to, like, patiently and carefully, you know, basically prove how that's totally wrong.
It's just not borne out by history.
It is a fictional narrative that.
People in the South create after the war to try to rationalize what happened.
Is there like a resource online where people can go and like read the original documents that were written by these people?
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Google, you know, with Jefferson Davis, with Alexander Stevens, the president and vice president of the Confederate States of America, see their declarations.
You can read them for yourself.
Read them verbatim.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they're all available to be sure.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it secedes.
If you think of the Confederacy.
I guess nowadays it's interesting.
Geographical differences and the labels that you assign to them.
You get to that a little bit in the beginning with the West.
But nowadays, when you talk about the South, typically Florida is not included in that.
The South is like Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, right?
And then Florida is like this sort of proxy state of New York.
Maybe some parts of South Florida might be, right?
Because if you drive north to Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, all of these areas, it's more of Southern culture and You know, country music and southern food, and like the more of the history happened up there.
I don't, you never really hear about any of the history in Florida.
Oh, it's there too.
I mean, Florida is very much part of the South, to be sure.
And no one before World War II would have thought of Florida as an appendage of New York.
That's only a recent thing, really, only the last like 50 years or so.
Yeah.
Yeah, Florida secedes, it's part of the Confederacy.
Just look at Florida's state flag.
On Florida's state flag, you'll see that red cross of St. Andrews.
Can you pull that up, Steve?
The Florida flag?
I need some history on Florida.
White background with a red St. Andrew's cross in the middle.
Okay.
Andrew's Cross in the middle.
That's the same cross you see on the Confederate battle flag.
That's the Confederate battle flag.
Oh, shit, look at that.
It's basically the same state flag as Alabama.
You can pull up the Alabama state flag, it is virtually identical to Florida's, aside from the seal.
The seal is, of course, different.
By the way, both Florida and Alabama put that St. Andrew's Cross on their state flag, not right after the Civil War, but actually in the 1890s.
They do it right within the same years.
And that's in the 1890s as well.
And that's the Reconstruction period?
This is after Reconstruction.
After Reconstruction.
Yeah, because Reconstruction really winds down in the late 1870s.
So in the 1890s, Mississippi puts the full on Confederate battle flag on its state flag.
And then Alabama and Florida put it kind of like halfway on with just that flag.
Oh, they were one foot in, one foot out.
Yeah.
And you might wonder, like, wait, why would these.
So talking about the Confederate battle flag is one of my favorite things to talk about.
Yeah.
Because there's so much mythology.
There's so much mythology and confusion.
Yeah.
And it's just so much like.
Actively toxic misconception relating to this flag.
But so these three states put that banner on their state flags in the 1890s.
Okay.
And there's a very simple reason why.
Because in the 1890s, they felt that white supremacy was under attack and under threat in their societies.
And they wanted to kind of bolster white unity and to make a common front against black success and black challenges in the political spectrum.
The 1890s.
This is why I'm so fascinated with Red Dead Redemption 2 and the fact that it's also a Southern game and a Western game.
The stereotype of Red Dead 2 is that, oh, it's a Western, it's a cowboy game.
Well, yeah, sure, it is that in some senses.
But then a huge chunk of the game plays out in the Deep South in the 1890s.
The 1890s is that same decade that Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi put that Confederate battle flag on their state flags.
Oh, wow.
So this is like a really important decade in Southern history.
I think when we think about big decades in Southern history, we think about The 1860s, the Civil War, or the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement.
But I would say the 1890s is actually the third most important decade in Southern history because it's at this moment that white supremacy, white rule, white power comes under tremendous threat.
And as a result, there's this huge backlash to try to reshape Southern society to bolster and reinforce white supremacy.
So the flags have everything to do with this.
It's in the 1890s that the South also begins building these monuments to the Confederacy.
Like these big tall statues that have been getting torn down in the last five years.
Those start coming up in the 1890s, not in the 1860s or 70s, not right after the war, in the 1890s, like a full 30 years after the Civil War is over.
In the 1890s is when the first Jim Crow laws are passed.
It is when you see those signs that say for colored, for white.
Those did not exist really systematically until the 1890s.
In the 1890s is when they begin popping up.
So the 1890s is this moment of tremendous change in Southern history where there's a threat.
From below, basically a threat of poor whites and poor blacks potentially coming together to challenge the bigger system.
And then this tremendous backlash, which brings Confederate flags on state flags, which brings statues, which brings all the Jim Crow laws, this total reorganization of the South, which is then going to stay in place for the next 70 years until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Can you give me just the 30,000 foot overview of the history of the origin of Jim Crow?
Yeah.
Comes from like a comedian play or something?
Right.
So, yeah, Jim Crow is not actually a real person.
It was a character in minstrelsy shows.
So, like, minstrelsy is something most Americans don't know much about.
It's best that we forget it.
It's something that I tried to sweep under the rug.
But minstrelsy is really America's first pop music genre.
It starts in the 1820s and 1830s.
Minstrelsy?
It's white people putting on blackface and singing songs about black people that's meant to parody them and belittle them and this sort of thing.
And this is not just a Southern thing.
Thing.
It's a, like in New York.
Minstrel.
In New York City, you could go to minstrel shows in the 1830s and 40s.
That'd be wildly popular.
So, one of the common characters in these minstrel shows was a character named Jim Crow.
And he was meant to be, you know, the sort of stereotypical, uneducated, backwards African American.
Okay.
So, when these laws start coming around in the 1890s, people start calling them Jim Crow laws because, you know, they're also kind of tangled up with this older history of, you know, of racism.
Was there a proper name for them or how did they get, how did Jim Crow laws stick?
Like, obviously, like, they're not formally called that.
Like, when the states passed them, they're called segregation statutes.
Segregation statutes.
Okay, gotcha.
Yeah.
And now we just call them Jim Crow laws because.
Right.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
So it's interesting.
You know, you might imagine that Southern society had always been totally segregated.
And that wasn't actually true.
Under slavery, for example, black and white people were often close proximity with one another.
They're often, I mean, African Americans worked in white homes, they nursed white children.
Really?
Nursed them?
You have evidence of this happening.
Yeah, to be sure, of wet nurses who would be engaged in homes.
So there was very close physical contact between people, right?
So then slavery ends and the South leaves the Civil War era.
And some things are initially segregated.
For example, schools.
First off, there wasn't much schooling at all going on in this period, very little public budgets for education.
But when the first schools are created with public resources, then they're separate, right?
So that happens soon after the Civil War.
And churches also tend to segregate after the Civil War, that you have black churches and white churches.
But then there were lots of things that were not segregated.
And really, there's this like 30 year window after the Civil War when things are really fluid, things are really unpredictable, when train cars were not segregated, when trolley cars are not segregated, when stores are not segregated, when waiting rooms are not segregated, restaurants, well, that was a little trickier.
But it's only in the 1890s that you see a systematic effort to put into place Massive public segregation, right?
The kind that we think of, you know, we think of like the South after the Civil War.
But it only comes together quite a bit afterward.
And you might wonder, like, why is that happening?
Again, it comes back to this fear of a threat that's going to shake the foundations of the South and of white supremacy.
And this wasn't going on in the North.
Well, there was already segregation in many Northern states already.
So, in many ways, the South kind of imports a Northern practice of Of segregation.
So, this is not a uniquely Southern institution, though it's much more entrenched and legalized in law much more so in the South after the 1890s than it ever was in the North.
There's plenty of discrimination and rules against black folks in Northern states, too.
Right.
And then a lot of people in the South, I think you touch on this briefly, but I believe some of the slave owners were always living in the state of paranoia, fearing like a revolt.
Or a rise up from the slave population.
Like always looking over their shoulders or.
Yeah, for sure.
And because there were many examples, I mean, not countless examples, but there were very notable examples of enslaved people revolting.
Nat Turner, for example, in 1830s Virginia.
These are the kinds of things that kept white slave owners up at night, right?
Like they were very anxious and worried about this, which is why they instituted this massive infrastructure to try to prevent these sorts of things slave watches, patrols, the constant threat of violence hanging over the society.
So there's lots of sort of checks that they try to put into society to keep this from happening.
Right.
But in many ways, the Civil War is kind of the biggest slave revolt of all time.
We don't often think of it that way, but like black people in the South play a really crucial role in.
Overthrowing the Confederacy.
It's not just white Northern troops that come in and do it all.
From within, Black people are actively working to sabotage the Confederacy, right?
Either by joining the U.S. Army or just by chipping away with sabotage, foot dragging, resistance, you know, from within.
So, like, the Confederacy is fighting so many enemies.
Yes, it's fighting U.S. armies, but it's also fighting against Black people from within who are trying to destroy the Confederacy.
And what's really fascinating to me, Danny, I don't know if you know this, there were a good number of white Southerners who really resisted the Confederacy as well.
Because remember, And this is also a fact that's not widely known, right?
Only about 30% of white Southerners before the Civil War owned enslaved people.
The wealthy ones, right?
Yeah.
I mean, 30%, right?
So 70% of white Southerners did not own slaves.
Now, did that mean that they were pro black?
No.
Right, right.
If they could have, they would have, right?
Many, for sure.
They really, you know, they were jealous often of their slaveholding neighbors because they saw holding enslaved people as a social, you know, as a way to lift themselves up in society, right?
Like social progress.
So they're quite bitter and resentful toward them.
But it's fascinating because I live in eastern Tennessee, right, in the kind of mountains of southern Appalachia.
And it's specifically in the southern mountains that you see really a revolt against the secession of, you know, a rebellion against the rebellion, in the sense that a good number of white southerners in the mountains say, no, I don't want to be a part of this Confederate, you know, war effort.
I'm going to fight against it.
Fort Pillow And Slave Trading00:14:41
You know, there was unionism that was quite pronounced and, you know, favoring the U.S. in this period.
And I understand why, in part because the Civil War is really started by rich people.
It's started by big planters and it's largely fought by poor people, which is why folks often describe the Civil War as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, which there's a lot of reality to.
So, like, you know, people in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, where slavery existed, but it wasn't nearly as prevalent as it was in, you know, Middle Georgia or something like that, those folks are like, you know what?
I don't really want to risk my life.
For the cause of slavery, since what do I stand to benefit from this?
So, you'd have like serious guerrilla warfare taking place in like Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky of white Unionists fighting against the Confederacy.
Like really nasty, irregular warfare.
It's really pretty grim stuff.
But like, this is the side of the Civil War people don't hear about.
What kind of warfare tactics or like guerrilla warfare tactics were the slaves in the South using against the Confederates or the slave owners?
Right.
I'm sure a lot of it was like, Like cutting throats in the middle of the night, or like, there's some of that.
I'm sure they didn't have like, did they steal the weapons, or how did that work?
Well, it depends, right?
If you're able to reach Union lines and join the U.S. Army, join the U.S. CT, the U.S. Colored Troops, then suddenly you have a rifle in your hand, right?
So then you have quite a bit of power to change things.
Right.
And how did they organize?
Like, how would they get away to organize, right?
It depends.
I mean, it depends on how far U.S. troops had come into the area, it depends how fragile the You know, the plantation system was in there.
Was in there.
I mean, the Civil War looks so different in various places, right?
Because, you know, the patterns of the course of the war look very different, whether, you know, you're on the Mississippi River or whether you're deep in the middle of Texas or it just depends.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of kind of diversity within the war story, to be sure.
Right.
Huh.
But yeah, I mean, the Civil War is such an astoundingly fascinating moment in American history.
Yeah.
And it's one that's been the recipient of so much mythology and so much, you know, I mean, how many books are published each year on the Civil War?
It's just unbelievable.
But I still feel like, despite all This obsession, despite all the documentaries, despite the books that are published, I think most Americans still have a pretty hazy understanding of what this was all about.
Yeah.
Right.
We have very simplistic stories of, you know, like, oh, we have a really unified white South and a really unified white North.
And no, that's not true.
There were tons of anti war people in the North, people who did not want to fight this war at all.
There were tons of anti war folks in the South, right?
I just talked about, you know, it's kind of Appalachian Unionists and African Americans, to be sure.
So, this, you know, like, there was a really good chance that Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln has to run for president in 1864, like in the midst of the war.
He has to get reelected democratically in the system.
And there was a really good chance that he was going to lose.
I mean, he squeaked by, you know, just barely.
But a lot of people were worried that he was going to be beaten.
And the guy who was going to beat him was going to probably end the Civil War and let the South go.
Really?
Right?
Wow.
So, or at least make peace in some kind of, you know, in a very different manner.
Like people were exhausted by the war by 1864.
So, who was the guy.
I think his name was Forrest or something, the general who got a statue.
Oh, we got to talk about him.
His statue just recently got demolished or something.
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Yes.
Probably the most infamous Tennessean who fought in the Civil War.
Because I think he's such an important character.
And outside of Tennessee, not all that many people know about him.
And I think if you don't know about him, you can't understand the Civil War.
And you also can't understand what happens afterward with Reconstruction and with the Ku Klux Klan.
Okay.
So here's a basic.
So, who is this guy?
Sure, who is this guy?
And why is there a Confederate battlefield?
Is that the statue of him right there?
Well, no, it's like a girl on a horse.
That is literally the ugliest statue of him ever, though it's recently been moved.
Holy shit, what the?
It is the most ridiculous statue.
That's terrible.
It's near Nashville.
It's like they couldn't afford the professional.
I mean, this really, there's so many other reasons why this is the worst statue of all time, like historical reasons.
But aesthetically, visually, it makes you want to bark.
It's not even like a proportional human.
Look at the size of his head.
So, my students actually told me recently that the statue is gone.
Like, it used to be very visible on the interstate driving near Nashville.
Uh huh.
Someone had painted it hot pink recently, the last time I saw it.
Oh, there it is.
There it is.
But from what I've heard, that statue is no longer there.
I can't confirm that personally because I don't drive around Nashville all that much.
But I think.
What did I write on it?
Oh.
Zoom in.
Oh, you can't zoom.
Yeah.
No, it won't let me.
Oh, man.
So, here's a monster.
No, it says monster.
Oh, monster.
Monster down the legs.
They really nailed it with Monster.
So, who is this guy?
Who's Nathan Bedford Forrest?
Right.
And when I tell you the story, it's going to blow your mind, especially the kind of post the later parts of the story.
So, Nathan Bedford Forrest is from Tennessee and he's born into pretty humble circumstances.
He's not a super rich guy, but he has this astronomical rise to wealth and fame through his profession, through what he does for a living.
And what does he do for a living?
He's a slave trader.
Profitable slave trader in the city of Memphis before the Civil War.
So he's like a middleman?
No, he's a guy like auctioning off, like selling human beings, right?
Like he's like, no one is profiting more from the institution of slavery than Nathan Bedford Forrest.
He's out there.
He owns people.
He takes.
He's kind of a middleman, right?
So, if he grew up in humble beginnings, how did he get to own all these slaves?
Through hard work, if you can call it that, you know, in this awful profession.
But he builds a sort of empire.
He finds himself, you know, speculating and gaining more wealth through human property that he makes.
I think he's earning about $100,000 a year by 1850s dollars, which is a shitload of money, right?
So, relative to today?
Oh, no.
It's a million.
Oh, no.
He's a multi, multi millionaire in 1850s Memphis.
This might be a stupid question, but relative to today, what was the cost of a slave?
Let me see.
I want to say, and I have to check back on the numbers here, they would probably be about a thousand.
You know what?
I mean, I can't pull the statistic off, but they're expensive, right?
Oh, we're going to ask Reddit here.
Okay, so about.
How much did slaves in America cost in today's money?
The real price of a slave in 1850 is around $2,000.
$12,000 in today's money.
And the net earnings of owning a single slave is around $82,000.
I mean, you know, I wouldn't necessarily trust Reddit as our first story.
But here's the deal.
I mean, you know, the whole system is so toxic, right?
I mean, how do you possibly quantify a human being's worth?
Yeah, this Quora thing says generally around $500 for a young adult male and $1,000 for what?
I can't see it now.
I made it too small.
So listen to this.
This is really fascinating.
At the eve of the Civil War, The value of enslaved people was the single greatest piece of wealth in the South.
Like much more than land, much more than cotton.
Most of the planters, like the aristocracy in the South, most of their wealth lay in enslaved people, which means that by 1865, when that institution is gone and all that money disappears, the South gets enormously much poorer as a result.
Because the amount of property, quote unquote, just disappeared.
So buying enslaved people, you know, it was not cheap in that you needed to have money and resources, which is why Nathan Bedford Forrest is earning so much money.
Selling people, really.
He's selling people primarily from the eastern seaboard, from old slave holding states like Virginia, like North Carolina, toward the kind of boom zones of the South, which is Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, like places that have been recently settled.
You know the phrase being sold down the river?
Like it's kind of a bad thing happening to you?
Yeah.
That's literally a reference to enslaved people being sold from the eastern parts of the South into the kind of southwestern parts of the South, because that's where all the money, that's where all the cotton, that's where all the boom is going on.
So someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest, they're making money transferring human beings, enslaved human beings, From the kind of old core of slavery in Virginia to the new kind of glowing center in the West.
Yeah, in places like the Mississippi Delta, in Louisiana.
So if you're a slave owner in like Tennessee or Georgia or something like that, and you got a lot of slaves, you would essentially, so assuming that they bought them for a price a couple years ago, they would say, okay, I have too many, I'll sell them for a profit.
Yeah, the value as this toxic market quantified was far higher in the Mississippi Delta than in.
Eastern Virginia, right?
Or Eastern North Carolina.
So that's how Forrest is making his money, right?
He is actively profiting from the forced relocation, right?
Breaking up of families, the tearing apart of people's lives to siphon them, selling them down the river, quite literally, to the West.
And, you know, he was this really famous and rich guy.
So when the Civil War breaks out, no one at all was shocked.
What side is he going to pick, right?
Like, a guy who makes his entire living off of the practice of slavery, of course, he's going to be a fervent supporter.
Of the Confederacy, which he is.
He joins the military and he rises in the ranking of the military so that he is a commander.
I can't remember what his precise title was.
You can probably find it, Steve.
Yeah, I'm sure you can dig it up.
He's a cavalry officer.
Who is the dude?
Forrest.
This is Nathan Bedford Forrest again.
What was his full title in the Confederacy?
I'm blanking on it at the moment.
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Is he a general?
Will Wikipedia tell us the truth about him?
He's a high up guy.
I'll tell you that much.
Okay.
A Confederate Army general.
Oh, well, he'll have his thingy down here.
So.
Specifically, yeah, he was a Freemason.
A lieutenant general.
So, one of the most infamous moments in the Civil War involves this guy.
Okay.
So, it's in 1864, I want to say.
He is commanded to take this fort in western Tennessee that's on the banks of the Mississippi River called Fort Pillow.
And Fort Pillow was one of these forts that the U.S. Army had taken really early on in the war because the U.S. like tries to get Control of the Mississippi River as soon as possible because they want to basically choke off the South.
They've got a blockade on the Atlantic and they want to choke them from the western side by gaining control of the river, which they do quite early on.
But their control of that is weakening by 1864.
And Forrest is given the task of retaking this fort in western Tennessee, pretty close to Memphis, called Fort Pillow.
And he's eager to do this because he knows that the U.S. soldiers who are holding this fort at Fort Pillow are in large part African American.
That there are hundreds of USCT, US colored troops, who are holding this fort.
And you know his relationship with black people.
He's made his living selling their literal bodies.
So he has a tremendous grudge against any black person who would, A, defy the Confederacy, and B, resist, try to destroy the Confederacy by joining the US Army.
So when he attacks this fort in 1864, he has the upper hand in the battle.
It's pretty obvious that the Confederate cavalry is going to take this fort.
And they do.
The U.S. troops inside begin surrendering, expecting to be spared, right?
Expecting to become prisoners.
But Forrest wants to send a message, right?
He wants to send a message by executing nearly all of the African American troops fighting and resisting the Confederacy in the fort.
So this becomes not just the Battle of Fort Pillow, it's the massacre of Fort Pillow, where I think about 150 or so black troops are shot, execution style, by Forrest and his men, right?
People who are surrendering, right?
People like the battle is over.
And he, and he, and quote, Forrest says this again, I'm not making this stuff up.
He says the battlefield has to be dyed with the blood of black soldiers to prove that black people can't resist the Confederacy or whatever.
So he wants to send a message.
He's engaging in terrorism, essentially.
He wants to send this violent message so that there's going to be ripple waves of fear against any other black Southerners who would consider joining the U.S. Army.
It backfires against him, though, because people do remember Fort Pillow, but they do so as a kind of battle call to get black Southerners to join the army rather than that.
You heard, remember the Alamo, right?
Remember, Fort Pillow was something you would hear both in northern and southern black communities as a rationale to join the army.
It was a recruiting mechanism.
Exactly, right?
So, Forrest wanted the opposite.
Now, what about Forrest?
Why are these statues all over him, all over the South?
I mean, yeah, he's this kind of big Confederate cavalry general.
Well, after the war, his career continues because in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, this newly founded white supremacist terrorist organization, They meet in Nashville to elect their first Grand Wizard.
Who do they pick?
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
When was the Ku Klux Klan formed?
What year?
In 1866.
That's really when they're formed.
The year after the Civil War.
Yeah, exactly.
In Tennessee as well.
And so, yeah, so he's symbolically elected their first grand wizard, their first leader.
So this is a guy.
He's a slave trader.
He's a Confederate, you know, I mean, butcher, if you look at Fort Pillow, to be sure.
And then he's the leader of the first, the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Wow.
Listen to this.
Until 2020.
The state of Tennessee, the governor of the state of Tennessee was required to pronounce that his birthday was Nathan Bedford Forest Day, which means that the first seven years that I lived in Tennessee until 2020, there would be a Nathan Bedford Forest Day.
On his birthday.
That the state was meant to celebrate this dude until literally four years ago, right?
His bust was in the Tennessee Capitol in Nashville, like formally there.
What message do you think that sends to anybody about what the state?
Thomas Jefferson And Statues00:15:26
You know, was championing.
And is this something that just nobody talked about?
Because I'm sure if you had a conversation.
Oh, no.
Nobody talked about it.
Oh, really?
Well, African Americans had been pushing to remove this guy and to end his holiday forever, right?
They're like, this is an insult.
You know, like Tennessee has a large black community, like any Southern state, like any American state, but especially so in the South.
So they've been fighting from the beginning to get rid of this stuff.
And what was the pushback?
Oh, you know, this is heritage, not hate, right?
It's like this old debate about the Confederate battle flag.
I mean, Mississippi only removed the Confederate battle flag.
From its state flag like two years ago or something, like in the midst of Black Lives Matter.
That's how long it took for them to get rid of that thing.
So there's, you know, these myths die hard.
They dig down deep.
The lost cause, this sort of, you know, alternate explanation of the Civil War, it would have a powerful, you know, powerful reverberations.
But it's really important that we extricate that stuff, right?
Like we can't let that stuff haunt our society.
I mean, we didn't be aware of it, but to celebrate it, to celebrate Nathan Bedford Forrest.
To have a national day about Nathan Bedford Forrest, a guy who just.
Slaughtered a bunch of black people because they were fighting them in a war is ridiculous.
So, this all ties back, you know, Red Dead Redemption 2 can actually be a powerful way to address some of these things.
Because in the game, and any listener who's played the game knows this, as soon as you get into the South, this kind of deep southern part of the game, the state of this fictional state of Le Moyne, some of the very first things you see in the game are statues, statues to the Confederacy.
And you also have Confederate veterans all around.
You have this gang that you fight with, like your kind of rival gang.
They're called the Le Moyne Raiders.
And they're like ex Confederates who are still kind of celebrating the South's role in the Civil War and all this sort of thing.
And what's really interesting is that, I mean, the game is not recycling any of these Lost Cause myths, right?
I don't see Rockstar as like, you know, celebrating the Lost Cause.
Not at all.
Quite the opposite.
But they do show these statues.
And the one big difference, though, the one thing the game kind of gets wrong is that in the game, the statues appear to be really old.
Like they appear to be like weathered and like, you know, beat down by rain, snow, and ice and this sort of thing.
But in reality, in 1899, when Red Dead Redemption 2 is set, those statues would have been really new.
Brand new, right?
Because remember, the 1890s is this moment when white Southern elites felt like they were under siege.
Their society was crumbling and they need to double down and reinforce white supremacy in any way possible.
So they've thrown out these statues left and right.
So if the game was accurate, they would actually be really sparkling new.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny.
In the last couple of years, people have been crying the blues about statues.
There's been a culture war thing about people wanting to remove statues of, like, These people.
Yeah.
I mean, wouldn't you want to remove the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest?
You know, like this guy's, you want to put him on a pedestal?
Yeah, no, I mean, I wouldn't give a shit about that guy.
I wouldn't give a shit about that guy.
Well, he's only one of many.
That guy was a dirtbag.
I mean, he was a fucking murderer.
But, like, you see, especially during the whole Black Lives Matter movement, people trying to get rid of all the statues.
I think they even tried to get rid of the George Washington statue because he was a slave owner.
And I guess the moral question is where do you draw the line with these historical figures?
Obviously, there's a wide gap, there's like a wide spectrum.
Of evil in history, right?
So, like, if you're going to get rid of some of these statues, I forget the other guy who, um, Thomas Jefferson, maybe it was Thomas Jefferson.
There was a bunch of statues that were like vandalized and eventually like removed, right?
Because you know, during this like recent time of racial tension, well, there's always been racial tension, it's just much more public, and we were having public conversations about it.
You know, like that's how I understand Black Lives Matter, and to me, that's really healthy that we talk about these things.
But what do you think about like where to draw, like, the question of where to draw the line with?
Having memorials or statues of these people, whether they, let's say, they did something good, right?
Like Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson, right?
But at the same time, they also had this dark side where they were slave owners.
Well, I'm going to primarily address the question of Civil War Confederate statues, right?
Because, you know, Confederates were literally rebels.
I mean, they were enemies of the United States.
So that puts them in a different camp from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were the founders of the United States, right?
All slaveholders, but one were, you know, Traitors who were betraying the United States and others were not.
So, I'm going to focus on the Civil War stuff.
To me, what really shapes that whole debate is that those statues came up at a particular moment.
Like, to me, it matters that they came up in 1895, 1910, like this turn of the century moment that they did not go up right after the Civil War.
So, it's like at this moment when history is being weaponized and militarized to protect white supremacy, which is why those statues came up in the 1890s at that moment.
Because they wanted to solidify white control and white power.
Because they come around at that precise moment, we have to think about them very differently than if they came around in 1865 or something like during the Civil War.
So, because those statues were deeply political at the moment that they were built, that they were trying to broadcast a message.
And in fact, black people at the time wrote about this.
Like they were very aware of this.
Like when those statues start popping up in the 1890s and 19 aughts, they knew.
I mean, I have quotes that I found, black people saying, Well, it's really just white people talking to us about Jim Crow with those statues.
They're trying to send a message of, hey, white supremacy is the system that defines the South.
So, given what those statues were trying to do at the particular moment, like 30, 40 years after the Civil War, it's not just about that.
That suddenly means what we're debating is not just about the Civil War.
We're actually debating the 1890s and 19 aughts.
And that's a much easier conversation in some ways to have because.
It makes them just look so unequivocally nasty, right?
These statues.
Same with the Confederate battle flag, right?
Like when we talk about the Confederate battle flag, we're not just talking about the Civil War.
Yeah, we're talking about the 1890s, like when Florida puts that on its flag.
But we're also talking about the 1950s and 1960s when that symbol gets pulled in again on the behalf of segregationists and white supremacists to send another political message, right?
Like Georgia puts that Confederate battle flag on its state flag in 1955.
One year after Brown versus Board of Education, the Supreme Court case says segregation is illegal.
Illegal.
So, all of these states are taking these symbols and making it do political work for them at that particular moment.
So, for me, this debate is not just about the Civil War, it's about times after it when it's so obvious that this is about race and not just about race, but racial exploitation and white supremacy.
So, for me, that reason is simple that those statues have to go.
I'm not saying you have to destroy them, you could move them to a museum where you put a lot of context and plaques all around that help you understand.
Why did they come up at that moment?
But to keep them there in place as is without context, to me, that's kind of reinforcing the messages that they were meant to send in 1905, right?
And we do not want to send those messages.
Right.
But it's at the same time, it's important to tell those stories and not forget the stories of evil and bad things that were done so we can remember not to do them in the future.
Right.
I mean, think about it.
There are so many figures in American history who are deeply complicated.
Yeah.
Woodrow Wilson, for example, right, who's president in the World War I era.
He is a white Southern racist.
There's no denying it.
Like, he was a fan of the Ku Klux Klan.
I mean, he never joined or anything, but he looked positively upon, you know, their work, who believed that Reconstruction was this great mistake, you know, that black people didn't deserve political power.
Woodrow Wilson is the guy who, like, formally segregates Washington, D.C., like, brings Jim Crow to D.C., to the federal government.
But then he's also, like, a guy who does a lot of good things, too.
He's, like, a major, you know, Part of the Democratic Party in the 20th century.
He is a guy who, you know, helps defeat Germany in World War I, wants to put into place this like international system, the League of Nations that was going to like end warfare.
Like, you know, he has, he does some positive things.
Right.
How do we deal with him?
Do we just cancel him completely?
No, I don't think that's possible.
You know, same with Thomas Jefferson, who's kind of the founder.
Well, that's a whole other conversation.
But like, I just think we need to have open conversations about the The nasty stuff.
And then also acknowledge that, you know, people are also capable of doing positive things that ripple out to us today.
Yeah.
The first thing that came to mind when I started reading this stuff is that, like, today, even though racism has gotten a lot better compared to what it was in the Civil War era, it's still like a super hot, explosive topic in today's culture.
And, um, it's, there's nothing, there's nothing you can, Say about somebody that is as bad as calling them a racist.
The human race is just plagued with evil, atrocious sins that we've committed on each other throughout history.
Yet those topics aren't as explosive as the topic of just racism in the last 200 years of America.
But none are equally powerful to the problem of race in the last 200 years of American history.
As it shapes our lives, right?
I mean, yes, Greek pedophilia of 2,000 years ago is interesting and important in its own way, but our country was so profoundly shaped by the institution of slavery and by the imposition and the continued imposition of white supremacy as a legal system in the decades and century after that.
I mean, I get that people feel like, oh, it's an obsession, you know, but it has to be so because we have to grapple with this on a daily basis.
And you know what?
Americans have.
Always been grappling with this.
And in my book, I.
It's like an epigenetic curse.
It's something that Americans have felt the need to talk about for a long time.
It blows me away that the best selling book of the 1800s that was written during the 1800s was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a book about slavery.
Then the best selling book of the 1900s written in that century is Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, which is also about slavery and race.
Huckleberry Finn.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of folks out there today who want Americans to talk less about racism, to talk less about slavery.
And there's forces out there.
Some of them, which are in Florida especially, given the leadership of the state, who want to have fewer conversations about that.
But the reality is that these are fundamental to understanding American history, and that if we try to sweep them under the rug, we're never going to come to terms with them.
So it's really essential that Americans continue to talk about race, but to do so in a more enlightened, welcoming, and open manner than they have before, because they haven't really been talking about it for a long time.
Has it been.
Taken out of school curriculum or something?
Well, there's big, big battles over school education codes and everything.
What would the argument be against it?
So, teaching, so are they saying that teaching the true history of America, like what really happened during the Civil War, is not appropriate for kids?
Yeah, and that it makes people bitter, that it divides our society, that it makes people upset.
Interesting.
You have to get upset about this.
If we don't get upset about it, How can we reject the legacy of it, right?
I mean, we live in a society that's haunted by these patterns, and we have to have an open conversation about how to eliminate them.
Their argument is that we shouldn't teach the truth about American history because we need to forget it.
I think some people would probably agree with that.
I'm not one of them.
No, I don't think it's right to forget about history.
As a historian, you have to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly, right?
I mean, that means including the good, too, right?
There's good in many of these periods that we can find.
But to make ourselves feel content and sort of pat ourselves on the back in order to erase and submerge histories is a really dangerous thing to do.
I really believe that.
This is something that I'm super unfamiliar with and haven't been paying attention to, but the critical race theory idea.
What is.
Which side of that argument is the critical race?
Is that critical race theory?
Saying that you need to teach the truth about history, or are they saying that we should forget about history?
Here's the thing critical race theory is this legal studies field that's super niche that I will be honest, I never even heard of until about six or seven years ago.
So it's not something that's like dominating the academy.
Okay.
What it's become is a boogeyman for conservatives to say, oh, here's this catchy phrase that most of them probably don't even understand.
They don't read this stuff.
Do we know the definition of it?
I mean, if you work in this particular field, which is not all that many people, Then they're interested in.
Look, I'm a historian.
I don't work in critical race theory by any means.
But what I do is I study American history, right?
And that in which race plays a really important and influential role.
So basically, it's been this catchphrase that people have leapt onto to say, oh, there's this campaign to make white people feel bad about US history.
Bad about you.
That's how it's used in conservative circles, in kind of political rhetoric or so.
It's not actually something that very many high school or even college teachers are actively doing.
Are actively doing.
Some are, to be sure.
And those people who are doing that, you were wondering what sides they would be on, right?
They'd be pushing, not just for telling the true history, but for looking at things like subconscious racism, microaggressions, various ways that racism reproduces itself in less obvious ways.
So people in that field work on that.
But it's really not what I'm doing, it's not what most historians are doing.
Basically, I think a lot of folks on the right in the US have swooped down on this kind of very small subfield and argued that, oh, well, this is what every high school teacher and every college instructor is doing when this is really not actually the case.
However, we historians do place race as a central and powerful actor and factor in American history, and it's impossible to teach it without doing that.
The Fourth Ku Klux Klan00:09:35
Does that mean we're doing critical race theory?
No.
But it means that we're having hard and open conversations about race in the past, which is really necessary.
And thankfully, Red Dead Redemption 2, the video game, can prove an important sort of window to open and have those conversations and debates.
And that's a lot of what my book tries to do.
Yeah.
I can see what you're saying about the focusing on subconscious racism and microaggressions and stuff, how that could have a backfire effect and make people more push back harder against it.
Yeah.
I mean, these are contemporary topics that I'm probably less well equipped to, you know, to.
To put the final word on.
Right.
But I'll say most historians don't do critical race theory.
Right.
However, most historians of the United States really explicitly address questions of race and will continue to do so because you can't really understand where we're at.
Yeah.
I mean, how do you understand, you know, Nathan Bedford's, Nathan Bedford Forrest's career if you don't think about race?
Right.
It's the guy who literally made it his life's mission to police the boundaries of racial inequality.
Right.
So, like, we're going to tell his story and Nathan Bedford Forrest's day as a story without, like, oh, you know, Slavery wasn't that bad.
Like, how do you possibly tell that story?
Right.
Exactly.
I totally agree.
And so it's funny.
I had a guy in here a couple years ago, actually, who he grew up in.
I forget what state he grew up in.
Anyways, he was a young kid and he was doing some sort of a march in like, I think it was like South Carolina or something.
He had spent a couple years studying abroad in another country and he came back here and he had.
Spent most of his childhood actually studying in another country.
He came back here, he was like 10 or 12 years old, and he was like doing some sort of like march for his school.
It was like a Boy Scout march.
And he had somebody like throw a drink at him or throw, no, they throw a rock at him or something like that.
And they said it was like he was black and it was the first time he ever experienced racism.
And he came, he just became fascinated by it.
And he eventually went on to go like meet members of the Ku Klux Klan and befriend, he befriended a few of them.
Like he went to a bar that was specifically known as being like a KKK bar where all the clans members would go.
This is like in the last 20 years or so?
This is in like, yeah, the last 20 years.
Okay.
His name is Daryl Davis.
He went to a bar and he sat down next to like a clans member and he started having a conversation with them.
And he ended up befriending a bunch of them, even like some high ranking guys.
And some of the stories he has are fascinating.
But Basically, what he found is that all of these guys had never had a conversation with anybody that has any sort of opposing views than that.
Not only that, they had never had a conversation with a black person before.
And I think, like, all of them, maybe 99% of them, had never even left the five mile radius from where they were born.
Right.
Which is astonishing to see.
Like, these guys were so uneducated, had no experience with any kind of other human beings other than the people who were just looked just like them and thought just like them.
And I mean, he impacted some of these guys' lives, like, impacted them so much that.
They gave up the Klan and like gave him their robes, and he still has their robes today.
He brought them on the podcast.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Yeah, so I mean, you know, people can change their minds.
Yeah, and you know, when we're looking for positive, good stories to tell about humanity in America, how's that for a story, right?
That people can change their mind once they're exposed to the humanity of the people they once despised and they realize the complexity and history of the world that they live in.
Yeah, it just shows you, like, when you have such a myopic view of the world.
And you have experienced so little, how ignorant you can be to life.
I got to share another story about the KKK because they're a really profoundly American institution.
I don't say that with pride, right?
I say with shame.
Well, they're still around here.
They're still like you can drive an hour inward and they have reduced compared to what they.
So there's basically three clans that historians talk about, like three kind of moments, because as an institution, they ebb and flow.
They have these kind of moments of boom and bust.
Right.
So, the so called first Klan is that which takes place during Reconstruction after the Civil War, right?
1866 to like 1872.
Like, it's a pretty short window, right?
Like, in those four, five, six years, the Klan is at high tide and is actively working to destroy Reconstruction, right?
To destroy the potential of racial democracy, black men's voting.
But then it really fizzles out because it's really stamped out by the US government.
So, what's interesting is that in Red Dead Redemption II, you can meet the Klan.
They're not mentioned by name, but it's obviously supposed to be the Klan.
In 1899.
And that's actually wrong because there was no real Klan in the decades after 1872 or so, right?
So there's this like brief moment and then they're stamped out for many, many decades, like 1880s, 1890s, 19 aughts.
There's not really a Klan anywhere in the country until 1914.
Okay.
So in 1914, 1915, the Klan surges back out of nowhere and becomes way bigger than it ever did.
The first go around.
You said 1890?
No, no, no.
1890, they're still dead and dormant.
They're dormant.
I raise it because the video game is set in 1899.
Supposedly, the character encounters the clan, but that actually would not have been realistic.
Yeah, I've seen the videos where he encounters the clan in the forest.
Yeah, exactly.
The second clan, the second iteration, the second manifestation of the clan takes place between 1915 and 1930 or so.
At this moment, the clan is way bigger than it was because the first clan is really a southern institution.
Like Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, places like that.
The second Klan is a national institution.
And in fact, some of the states that had the highest numbers of members were states like New Jersey, Oregon.
Right.
Of course, New Jersey.
But you could find Klan members in any state, basically.
That was not true previously.
Right.
They were so powerful that in the 1920s, they staged like a full on march down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Tens of thousands of members wearing their conical hats and their robes and everything, that they were like a completely public, out in the open force.
So they have this moment, you know, when they're of massive influence across the entire country.
But then they fizzle out, the Great Depression hits, the Klan kind of membership crumbles.
When do they come back?
When do they come back?
Well, really during the black rights struggle, like during the civil rights movement, then in the 1950s and 60s, and then they surge back in and then have their moment.
Had some oxygen then, huh?
Yeah, right.
I mean, remember, Georgia puts the Confederate battle flag on its state flag in 1955.
So there's lots of white backlash against the government coming in and telling people how to live and trying to destroy Jim Crow.
But then it kind of fizzles.
So I guess maybe now where there's a fourth Klan, But it's much smaller than it was before, thankfully.
I know it's out there and you can find it, but it's not organized in the way, as far as I know at least, in the way that it was in previous historical iterations.
Yeah.
No, no.
I know there's little areas.
I think there's a little town called St. Cloud that's an hour, I think, east of here where I know there's bars and stuff that are known for having Klansmen there.
there's still places around here in florida where you can if you're driving down the interstate you can come to like an intersection and it's just all confederate flags and sure and all kinds of like civil war memorabilia and shit Right, right, right.
Florida is part of the South.
Yeah, I guess.
But then again, you can find Confederate battle flags anywhere from Washington State to Germany.
I think they're all over the place, right?
They're a global phenomenon, to be sure.
When did Florida add the Confederate thing to their flag?
1891?
Okay, so it wasn't later.
Yeah, no.
And thankfully, I mean, you know, it's a veiled allusion to the Confederate flag as of now, right?
The same way that Alabama does it.
Like Mississippi was just like, no, we're going full on.
Putting the entire with the stars and everything on their flag.
So, thankfully, Florida didn't go all the way or Alabama.
But, you know, I still think that the flag should be probably changed as a result just because of like the taint.
In that particular moment, right?
The 1890s is this really nasty moment.
I don't think, like, if I look at the Florida flag, it's weird.
I never really put two and two together that it was like an origination of the Confederate flag.
Yeah.
If it wasn't for when they changed it, I wouldn't have the suspicion either.
But given that Alabama did it the same, just about the same year, and the Mississippi did it, Put the full on flag on that same year.
It sure makes me mighty suspicious that that wasn't done as a sort of symbolic allusion to the Confederacy.
Yeah.
I mean, Florida was very much part of the Confederacy, right?
Slavery was a very important part of the Florida economy.
Where do you think we are now and where we're like, where culture and society in the United States is like where it is or where its trajectory is going compared to, because you said it's all been ebbs and flows since the beginning.
Social Media And The Flag Debate00:05:08
Right.
Like, wouldn't you say that?
Generally, everything is a lot better now, culturally and racially, because, you know, there's no, these laws don't exist anymore, these Jim Crow laws.
And I mean, there's obviously like, there's obviously inequality, right?
There's obviously like oppression.
There's parts of the country that are, you know, stricken with poverty where tax dollars could easily go to to lift up these parts of the world or these parts of the country, rather.
You know, whatever.
I mean, you could, Argue about this till the cows come home where tax dollars are spent, where they could be spent better, right?
But I think generally it's better, right?
I mean, take my answer with a grain of salt because I'm a historian, but I'm a white guy historian.
I don't live race the same way that people of color do, right?
So I can theorize from a detached perspective.
But like I've mentioned many times before, I believe that having open conversations about race that acknowledge the problems of the past and the present are healthy, right?
Because like, Sure, in the 1980s, Americans were not talking, white Americans especially, were not talking all that much about race and racial problems.
Does that mean that there was peace and harmony?
No, they were just swept under the rug and buried.
Black people felt it.
Mexican American people felt it.
They all knew about this.
It's just that white people didn't want to talk about it.
So, since Obama's election and then during Black Lives Matter, more and more white people are talking about it.
Is that a good thing?
Absolutely.
Some people might say, oh, there's more tension and division today because we're having these really inflammatory conversations about race.
Well, no, we have to have those conversations.
Not talking about it is not going to solve the underlying problem.
So, to me, that's important.
Social media has poured gasoline on it for sure.
Because it's done, it's obviously kept people in their own thought bubbles, right?
The way the algorithms work, especially on like Twitter and YouTube and all these things where people with their own ideas, they only get sent to people with the same existing ideas and they don't get exposed to outside opinions.
So that's really fucked it up with the media and being in front of these screens all day, every day that are just showing you shit that you want to see.
Yeah.
I mean, it cuts both ways, you know, in the sense that social media is what organized those major Black Lives Matter protests, you know?
So it does disseminate, you know, information and knowledge about.
Organizing.
But then it's all social media.
It's also disseminated lots of white backlash and lots of mythology about the Civil War.
And, you know, so I don't know.
I'm not a scholar of social media and how it's done.
Definitely it's a double edged sword, man.
I think it's probably done more harm than good.
Just because I'm old enough to have lived through some of America without social media, I'm a little skeptical of a lot of this.
But it's a tool for good and evil.
You know, I mean, this is true with anything, you know, like radio a century earlier, newspapers two centuries earlier.
They can be a Powerful tools for getting big, important ideas out there and tools for getting nasty, toxic ideologies out there, too.
So, how do we regulate that?
I don't know.
I mean, this is a country founded on principles of free speech, and I think that's important to maintain.
Have you seen?
There's actually a new Civil War movie that came out that's become very popular.
I haven't seen it yet, but I haven't even seen the trailer yet.
It's like a fictional Civil War based on the current state of our country today, right?
I haven't seen it.
It plays out what it would look like.
Too.
And there's like, it's become like such a popular talking point today.
Like, everybody thinks that we're on the brink of another civil war.
And it's like, you know, maybe things haven't gotten better.
Maybe it's just boiling over after all.
And maybe it's just been, you know, suppressed or forgotten about and people haven't been having the conversations that need to be had.
Yeah.
Of all the things that are going to ease tensions and bring about, you know, unity and, uh, Embrace between people.
That movie does not seem like it's it.
It seems like it's, I mean, again, I haven't watched the movie at all.
I know nothing about it.
The trailer was the first one.
Doesn't seem like a kumbaya type movie, no.
It looks like it's trying to commercialize hatred and division.
Capitalize on the moment, huh?
Yeah, which seems really shallow and unpleasant.
But, you know, I'm not going to be leaving this interview and going to watch the movie.
I'm giving them my hard earned money.
Again, I don't know the movie well enough, but just based on that minute long trailer, it seems like it's trying to sensationalize.
And commercialize.
Well, it seems like if there was a civil war today, I mean, it would be obviously there'd be nothing like the original civil war in the United States, but it would be something like the citizens versus the government.
But that would not be good because the government pretty much has its tentacles into like our phones and everything.
They'd be able to track where we are.
It would be such a different, such a different type of war.
Yeah, I can't pretend.
Scary to think about.
I understand that.
I, yeah, I'm not.
I'm not building my bomb shelter yet.
Class Conflict In Modern America00:06:44
I mean, because, you know, we think of the U.S., oh, there's red states and blue states, and they're all divided.
And, you know, everyone in one state, they all hate the ones and the others.
But, like, you know, I live in a red state in Tennessee, and I know that Tennessee is super divided.
You know, there's no homogeneity in my state about what the state of the world and politics.
You know, there's great divisions within them, and there's a great deal of diversity within.
I mean, so many of these so called red states, you know, they have large African American and large non white populations as well that are all part of it.
So, yeah, Texas is a good example.
They have, like, these giant cities that are.
Super loose.
Super divorced.
Right.
So it's, you know, things are not as simple as certain kinds of maps lay out.
Right.
But, you know, you mentioned previously that, you know, Americans are obsessed in talking about race and, you know, we have been, of course, for a long time.
But there's one conversation that many Americans are much more reticent to have.
And there's one conversation that the big businesses that run our media don't want us to have.
And that is a conversation about class.
That's a major component of my book, too, you know, and that this is a book about capitalism and the inequalities that capitalism produces.
And I think that that is a really important conversation that we need to have as well.
In part, you know, I said that this is a moment, the kind of late 19th century is a moment that really addresses our own very well.
And one way that that's definitely true is the question of income inequality, you know, the haves and have nots, because the Gilded Age, That's the word historians often use to describe this late 19th century moment, was one of the worst moments of income inequality within the US, where you have these big new capitalists, right?
Standard Oil, US Steel, Meatpacking, Swift, Armor, all these big new companies who made so much money, but are not exactly letting that trickle down in any way.
So you have a vast pool of really poor people and then a very small portion of very, very wealthy people.
That sounds a lot like America of 2024, you know?
And there's actually ways.
Economists have this really great quantitative index for measuring income inequality.
We call it the Gini coefficient or the Gini index, G I N I, named after this Italian economist.
So you can actually place a number on how unequal the distribution of wealth is in any country, right?
But the United States is the one that I know the best.
So the kinds of inequality that we see today in the US are really most comparable to those of the 1880s and 1890s.
And it hasn't always been like that, it hasn't always been flat.
Indeed, during the 20th century, there was a great dip in income inequality in the United States, mainly as a result of the New Deal, as part of government programs, part of unionization, right, of efforts to organize working people and get them on the same page that really pushed down income inequality quite a bit.
But then since the 1960s and really 1970s, it's been going back up again.
And many major corporations in the media and so forth have been very eager to have conversations.
About race, about Black Lives Matter, right?
You remember, all these companies are like, you know, we stand with Black Lives Matter, all this sort of thing.
And I get that.
That's great.
You know, I appreciate that.
But part of the kind of dark underside of all this is that anytime you're talking about race means you're not talking about class because no one wants to talk about class less than the major businesses that run this country, right?
Those are very awkward conversations to have, right?
Because your average CEO in the United States today earns more than 250 times as much as the average worker at that firm.
That sounds a whole lot like John D. Rockefeller and 1895, right?
So the more, the less we talk about money and inequality along lines of money, the happier the Fortune 500 companies are, right?
They're happy to talk about other things aside from that.
But I think that's another thing that the Red Dead Redemption 2 game can help bring understanding about because the game does acknowledge this reality of gross inequality in wealth.
Yes, I agree.
Race is used as a distraction from I mean, they're related.
Race and class often intersect, to be sure.
Obviously, yes.
But the race topic is much more of an explosive topic that can easily distract.
And then you have corporations that.
Blatantly use these things like Black Lives Matter to project this sort of like false image of morality, right, to the public.
And like, you know, for example, with, you know, all these companies, these like giant corporations trying to like jump on any sort of like social ideological trend possible to like make it feel like they're doing the right thing.
Unless it's about money and class.
Because they're not going to jump on those.
Yes, right, exactly.
Unless it's about money and glass.
I mean, again, I appreciate, even if they're hollow gestures, I still appreciate those gestures from big companies that, hey, we stand in favor of Juneteenth or acknowledging black history and all this about the struggle.
But they also need to address some other questions, some other gaping holes of inequality within the United States.
Yes.
But companies are never going to do that on their own, right?
It's going to take pressure from outside, whether it's from the government, which seems probably unlikely, or from regular people, right?
American history shows that people, when they come together, especially working class people and people who are not in the elite, can have tremendous power in shaping the world.
It doesn't happen every time.
There's a lot of failure in that history, too.
But then there's also success stories.
I mean, you know, I really appreciate having an eight hour workday.
That wasn't always a thing.
In the Gilded Age, eight hour workday is like something you might dream of.
But the labor movement helps us win that.
Things like minimum wages, things like social security, and just social supports, even though they might be minimal in the United States.
They're better than nothing.
And that was a product of a fight, you know, of people fighting together to achieve some of these victories.
So there are inspiring moments in history as well, right?
Cowboys went on strike to get better wages and better working conditions, you know, in Texas.
They failed largely.
But the fact that they did in the first place is pretty awesome, right?
You don't think of cowboys unionizing, you think of cowboys riding off into the sunset, not like banding together to advance their class interests.
But there is a long history of class as a powerful and divisive factor in American history.
Mexican Revolution And Borders00:14:46
Doesn't your book, did you say in your book that a large portion of the cowboys in the West were Mexican and black?
Yeah, a good chunk, right?
We have this very like John Wayne white man image of the cowboy.
And I'm not saying there were not white male cowboys.
Of course there were, right?
There were lots of local people and then Easterners who came around to do this.
But yeah, a huge chunk were Mexican or African American.
In fact, so many of the words in ranching culture are just bastardized Spanish lasso, ranch, rancho.
Yeah.
Lariat, Lariata, right?
Like so many.
Bronco, Bronco, right?
They're all just like Mexican or Spanish ranching terms that a bunch of gringos took and adopted and then tried to scrub clean of the interesting from it, explicitly or implicitly.
What is the.
Can you explain the history?
This is something I'm fascinated about the history of Mexico and the United States.
I know there was a war.
There was definitely a war.
Yeah.
Part of the United States currently, what used to be Mexico?
Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado.
Yeah.
Yeah, all of Texas.
It was Texas, you know, often spelled with a J instead of an X.
And what year are we talking here?
Until the 1836.
Can you find a map?
Is there a map of this we can see?
Pull up a map of Mexico in like 1821.
Like when Mexico becomes an independent nation in the 1820s, it contains huge portions of the United States.
Wow.
When the U.S. goes, there we go.
You can see right there, right?
So, like, look at the green one.
Click on the green one on the very far left.
When the United States grabs this land from Mexico in the 1840s in this war with the U.S., when the U.S. grabs that land, that's more than 50% of Mexico at the time.
Oh, shit.
And you know what's really wild?
That's nuts.
So, 1848 is the year that this land goes over to the U.S., 1849 is the gold strike in California as part of the 49ers and San Francisco and all that.
Imagine if all that gold had gone to Mexico rather than the United States.
We would have lived in a different world right now.
There's no denying it.
My God, dude.
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.
My first book is entirely about the U.S. and Mexico.
What's that book called?
It's called Agrarian Crossings.
Okay.
And it's basically about why the U.S. South and Mexico are way more alike than you would ever imagine.
Interesting.
Often we think about, oh, Texas and Mexico are similar or California and Mexico.
But I actually argue in this book that like Alabama and Mississippi are super, they share a tremendous amount of commonality with many parts of Mexico as well.
How so?
Well, mainly because they're plantation societies, not all of Mexico was, and I'm thinking historically, right?
I'm thinking kind of like in the deeper into the 1900s.
But they were organized around plantation agriculture and they had incredibly uneven systems of land holding, mainly meaning that a very small group of people owned almost all the land while Tons of landless people worked as sharecroppers, as tenant farmers and whatnot on that land.
And in Mexico, those tensions, those bitternesses of landless people are what ignite the Mexican Revolution.
I don't know if you know much about the Mexican Revolution, Danny, but it is the most crazy, grandest epic drama ever.
I mean, you want to watch a documentary on the Mexican Revolution, and your mind will be blown, in part because it's the first major social revolution of the 20th century.
So it's basically a dress rehearsal or sort of the first, you know. Version of what later happens with the Soviet Revolution, with the Chinese Revolution, with the Cuban Revolution.
There's lots of parallels between them because they're bottom up uprisings of disfranchised poor people to try to change the direction of society.
And in many ways, the Chinese, Soviet, and other revolutions look back to Mexico as a sort of first example that they could draw on.
And this all takes place right below the United States.
And the US is totally wrapped up in Mexico's history and all that.
And you cannot understand Mexico's history if you don't.
Understand the place of the U.S., nor can you, and as I'd argue, nor can you really understand American history if you don't understand the way that Mexico has shaped the U.S. as well.
That's not something we always think about.
What year was the Mexican Revolution?
1910 to 1920, or so.
Yeah, so kind of playing at the same time as World War I, I mean, before and after.
Right, right.
Yeah, and it's, you know, it includes the first land invasion of the United States by Pancho Villa, who invades New Mexico for like a day.
That's the first, I think, between.
The War of 1812 with the British, because they invade the territorial United States, and like Pearl Harbor.
The only thing in between would have been Pancho Villa riding into Columbus, New Mexico, shooting up this town as a sort of show of vengeance against the U.S. for meddling with the wrong side in the Mexican Revolution.
So there's all these crazy, you know, like a lot of these like photos you might see in a Mexican revolution, in a Mexican restaurant, you know, like of Mexican history.
That stuff is crazy.
You have no idea, you know.
I know you've had a lot of guests on the show, you know, talk about Mexico today.
Yes.
You know, about the drug war and all this sort of.
Thing, which is of course very tragic and fascinating in its own way.
But Mexico's deeper history into the 20th century is just mind blowing.
So, what year was this war between Mexico and the US?
1846 to 1848.
So, it's right before actually this war is what causes the Civil War more than anything.
You might be like, wait, how?
Because you remember that map, right?
All that green that the US swallows.
Yes.
Well, the big question was are those going to be slave states or are they going to be free states?
That was the huge dilemma that people were fighting so viciously about in the 1850s, right?
In that decade leading up to the Civil War.
It's these reasons that actually help us help to explain why Texas is such a freaking massive state.
Like, I don't know if you've ever driven from like El Paso to like Houston.
You're just like, when does the state end?
Why is it so big?
Why is there nothing quite as big as it?
It's all related to the politics of slavery in this time period because slavery was entrenched in the, uh, Texas, by the time that Texas becomes a state.
But most of the slaveholders wanted Texas to become multiple states, mainly because every state, of course, gets to send two senators to Washington and representatives.
And those would all be pro slavery senators, right?
So people in other parts of the US and the North were like, no freaking way is Texas coming in as like six states, because that's going to tilt the level of power so much in flavor of slavery that we'll never have any way to resist.
So it's like the agreement was that, okay, Texas comes in as one state.
A slave state, but that it remains massive.
So, next time you're driving across it and thinking, like, why is it so big?
Slavery and the lead up to the Civil War and the Mexican American War, right?
Because it's land that's taken from Mexico.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Yeah, it's wild.
And then, so how did Mexico and the U.S. agree on where to draw this line and how much of Mexico the U.S. was going to swallow?
Yeah, well, they don't agree.
There's a lot of fighting about it, to be sure.
And there's some extra, you know, there's disputes that last for decades and decades afterward.
But, you know, the U.S. militarily, Wins the Mexican American War, right?
I mean, they occupy Mexico City, like they march troops down and occupy the capital.
And there were some Americans who wanted to annex all of Mexico, right?
Take the whole country, not just the northern third or half of it.
Those voices eventually get pushed aside.
But yes, I mean, so the history of these countries is so wrapped up with each other.
And what I find most interesting, right?
Because when most folks in the US today think about Mexico, two things come to mind drug trade and immigration.
Yes.
And when it comes to immigration, We really cannot understand Mexico's, you know, the patterns of Mexican immigration to the US if we don't understand how the US has actually caused some of that migration, how the US has actually spurred and propelled immigration into the US, which is a whole different story that, you know, I don't know if you have the time to go into it.
But there's all kinds of examples of how US actions and interventions in Mexico have actually accelerated immigration to the US.
Please explain.
Okay.
There's the question of immigration law.
So in 1924, the US passes this really exclusive immigration law package.
It's mainly aimed at keeping Europeans out.
This period of Ellis Island, right?
Lots and lots of Italian and Russian and Polish and whatever immigrants coming.
So the US is interested in passing, you know, like it's a very Trump style immigration law in 1924.
It's very exclusive.
It's meant to block lots of people.
And they passed this in 1924, the Johnson Reed Act.
But they have one exception.
They say anyone from Mexico can come whenever.
It's like we're going to shut out Chinese, we're going to shut out Europeans, but Mexicans can still come.
And the reason why is that some of the big agribusinesses in places like Colorado and Texas and California, they really depended upon cheap labor from Mexico.
So they pushed Washington to say, well, let's exempt Mexicans.
Okay.
Right.
So for like the next 40 years, while the country was really shut off to most other people, Mexicans were allowed to enter in unlimited numbers to the United States.
Right.
So in that sense, the U.S. already begins propelling and kind of building a migratory relationship with the U.S.
Then during World War II, the U.S. federal government actively begins recruiting Mexican immigrants to work in the U.S. under a program called the Bracero Program.
And bracero is just a word in Spanish meaning like manual laborer.
Like brazo means arm.
So it's like someone who works with their arms.
So beginning in 1942 and then lasting all the way until 1965, the US government gives like 5 million contracts to Mexican men to come and work in agriculture primarily and industry in the US.
So the federal government is overseeing the huge migration of Mexican workers to the United States that is completely legal.
I mean, it's basically a guest worker program that is, once it comes to an end in 1965, It is going to, you know, even after it ends, it's established these patterns and cycles, right?
Like paths of migration, which are going to continue way after 1965.
Except, of course, by that time, they're now considered undocumented, even though the US has been legally encouraging this for so many decades at that point.
Wow.
That's a big part of the story.
Well, that even happens today, right?
They even have programs today.
I had recently had a guy who was born in San Diego, but his whole family lives in Tijuana.
But his mom and his aunts, I guess, they cross the border every day to go work in a hotel in like San Diego or something.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, historically, there's been a lot of circular migration, a lot of back and forth, and most migration to the U.S. would have fallen into that category.
But ever since the 1980s, when the U.S. has really been doubling down on reinforcing the barrier and building fences and making it harder and harder to cross, there's less and less circular migration.
And there's much more permanent migration, which actually means that there'll be more and more immigrants who stay in the U.S. rather than if the borders were somewhat loose, which is intriguing to think about.
So, like when Reagan pushes through this big immigration law in the 1980s, the so called IRCA, It was meant to reduce the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the US, but it actually ends up raising them because people just decide that we're going to stay permanently rather than going back and forth like every season.
So that's a separate topic.
Interesting.
So explain what happened after we basically drew that new border that gave us basically a giant chunk of Mexico and it turned into the United States.
And some of those, like, there was some sort of an agreement that.
Had to be made where the people that were Mexicans living on this new part of the United States, former Mexico, they had to have some sort of like laws to make them citizens.
Yeah, right.
And this gets at some really interesting riddles when it comes to ideas about race in America again, right?
So when the U.S. carves off this tremendous chunk of territory that they now call the United States, right, as a result of the Mexican American War, there were hundreds of thousands of people living in that area.
It's not like vacant.
Territory.
There's lots of people who consider themselves Nuevo Mexicanos, Californios, Texanos, right?
Spanish speaking peoples who had been part of Mexico, but now, because of this war, are now part of the United States.
And I like to think of these people as folks who didn't cross the border, but the border crossed them quite literally, right?
Like they literally get in a different country because the border just moved.
So at the negotiating table in 1848, Mexico has just been defeated militarily by the U.S., so they don't have a ton of clout and political capital to kind of bargain with, but they sit down with the Americans in the small town of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the center of Mexico.
And they're working out the details of this peace treaty.
And Mexico knows they're going to lose a ton of territory, right?
But they're eager to push to make sure that these folks who are like, you know, who just got captured by the US by the border shifting, that they get a fair shake.
The Mexican government wants to make sure that these former Mexicans have an opportunity not to be taken advantage of by their new American neighbors.
So they work out the details in this treaty that says these folks should be allowed an opportunity to return to Mexico.
In a sense, they're not returning at all, they're just moving into Mexico.
Or if they stay, they need to be granted US citizenship, right?
That's basically the deal that the Mexican government is able to negotiate at the treaty.
They say if these people stay, which most of them do, because who wants to move, right?
It's good staying where you are, that they have to be given US citizenship.
And the US government says, yes, we will give citizenship to all these people.
However, that puts the US government in a bit of a pickle because it had laws at the time that said who's eligible to become a US citizen.
And the rule of the day said that there's only one group of people who are allowed to get U.S. citizenship, who are eligible for naturalization, right, for becoming a citizen.
Racial Categories And Heritage00:03:38
And there's three words that define that category free white persons.
They have to be a free white person in order to be eligible to naturalize.
So, what that means is that because the U.S. has now told the Mexican government that these, you know, Nuevo Mexicanos and Californios are going to be Americans, that they are white.
Because they're not going to change the law saying that.
Oh, we should change it so non white people can become it.
Instead, he's going to say, oh, all Mexicans are legally white.
Well, that goes against the famous one drop rule that you mentioned.
Yeah, one drop rule is more about African descent and about blackness than it is about Mexicanness.
But yeah, so it's a little somewhat of a separate issue for this.
But yeah, basically in 1848, the U.S. says, oh, all Mexicans are legally white.
This is part of the reason why when you fill out a census form or something like an employment form, you'll see that.
Latino or Hispanic, or whatever they want to call it, is not considered a racial category.
It's considered something separate, right?
Like you check white, black, Asian, whatever, but then there's a separate little thing that says ethnicity.
Ethnicity, exactly.
Latino or Hispanic or something, right?
With a sense that, like, you can be white and Latino, or you can be black and Latino, right?
There's lots of people in both those worlds who have two heritages.
So a lot of that kind of weirdness about, well, what is race?
What is ethnicity?
It all stems from these strange rules that the US put into effect in, you know, the 1840s, a really long time ago.
And it still shapes us down to this present day.
God, that's so bizarre, man.
Yeah.
Well, that's one of the things I try to get at with this book, too, is to talk about race not as science, not as biology, but as an idea, as something in our heads more than in a scientific rule book.
And I'm not saying that people don't look different.
Obviously, we all look different.
We have different skin tones, different facial features, all that sort of thing, body types.
But what is ridiculous is the idea that there's racial categories, right?
That everyone neatly belongs to, right?
That like there's white, there's black, there's Latino, Asian, whatever.
That those are like scientific categories.
Because let's be honest, that is total BS.
It is not true.
They are total inventions, and they have been very slippery and fluid over these past centuries.
Because there's so much, there's such a mixture of co-mingling of these people, like reproducing with other parts of the world and mixed people.
Folks who've tried to say you're either in or out are usually doing so to put non-white peoples in a lower bracket in some ways.
So I'm saying it's all wrapped up with questions of power.
And inequality.
So, you know, this one drop rule, right?
I mean, this is the most powerful lie in many ways as part of this.
That, you know, it gives rise to this paradox that, like, according to American racial thinking, and it's changing in many ways, but traditional American racial thinking says that a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child.
So, think about that paradox like, how does that make any sense whatsoever?
It just proves that race.
Is invented.
It is a, historians and scholars like to call it a social construct, right?
It's something that we've created and imagined.
It's in a lot of people's imaginations, so it's important, right?
It's powerful, but it doesn't make it real.
It doesn't mean that it's like biological.
Like there's DNA that says that you are black or white.
No, black and white are ideas that people have invented and have been used for very many nasty purposes, to be sure.
Roger Clark Reads Red Dead00:03:14
And again, Red Dead 2, you know, it doesn't go all the way in talking about race as a social construct.
I wouldn't expect it to, but it like critiques this question of, You know, race as neat containers.
There's some great moments in the game where the protagonist, who's a white guy, frequently questions and challenges all of the inequality along lines of race that he sees around him in the society.
And that's why I think this game, Red Dead 2, can be a really powerful way to, again, open conversations about people who challenge and criticize the status quo when it came to race.
Not all white people agreed with this thing.
There were lots of critics of white supremacy who were white.
Arthur Morgan might be one of them, right?
The main protagonist in the game.
Yeah, that's incredible, man.
Well, hey, dude, thank you so much for coming on here and talking about this stuff.
This has been a fascinating history lesson for me.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm really glad you could have me on.
And I really hope that, you know, whether folks love Red Dead Redemption 2 or whether they're history buffs or whether, you know, they don't know much about it at all, I really hope that this book, Red Dead's History, can be a way to.
You know, begin exploring some of these really big dilemmas that really shape where we are today and what would impact, you know, what that's the kind of society that Americans live in today.
Usually, people think of video games just as a waste of time, you know, as something that's, you know, you use it to kill time and relax or something.
But there's actually powerful ways that video games can be tools for learning, tools for, you know, understanding the complex nature of society.
Usually, they just need a little bit of help.
And what I do in this book is give a little bit of that.
A little bit of that help to like a little accompaniment, you know, sort of like a companion to Red Dead.
That as you're playing this game, read this book, or most importantly, not maybe most importantly, but maybe perhaps in a fun way for people who love the game.
We haven't mentioned this, Danny, but the audiobook version of this is narrated by the main actor in the game.
Oh, no way.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
So Roger Clark, who played Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, he is the narrator for my book, right?
So all the things that we talked about in these hours together, you can actually hear.
Arthur tells you in his iconic voice, well, to hear Roger tell you in his iconic voice in the audiobook version of this.
And the book comes out on August 6th.
And I hope that folks will be interested in joining the journey.
I certainly had a lot of fun writing it and being a part of its creation.
Available everywhere you get books, I assume?
Yep.
Amazon, Target, Barnes Noble, and then Audible and all the big, yeah, Spotify, all the big audiobook outlets as well.
Awesome, man.
Well, I can't wait.
I'm going to definitely download that audiobook and listen to that again.
It looks much better than my shitty AI PDF reader that I listened to it with.
Yeah, you want.
Roger Clark reading it, not some crummy AI.
Yeah.
Because there are certain tasks that computers can never replace humans with.
This is one of them.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, thanks again, man.
I really appreciate it.
And I'll make sure we link the book and everything else below.