ad46749, Author at Not Even Past

Why I turned the ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ video game into a history class on America’s violent past

Preface for Not Even Past: What place do video games have in the history classroom? Until recently, most educators dismissed this medium as frivolous and sensational. But given the staggering time that students spend in these digital landscapes, and the increasing thoughtfulness and diversity of major games, it may be time for a reassessment. My own experience in teaching a college class on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history through the Red Dead Redemption franchise has convinced me that there’s tremendous future potential in the intersection of games and serious history. My experimental course at the University of Tennessee has seen unprecedented enrollments each semester, and student enthusiasm during class has similarly shot upward. I’ve adapted the course into a book, Red Dead’s History, which has also convinced me that digital games can provide a bridge for professional historians to reach wider audiences and share the academy’s wealth of knowledge. The book has granted me opportunities for public engagement that I could never have imagined previously – many made possible by my audiobook’s narrator, actor Roger Clark, who played Red Dead Redemption II’s protagonist. Roger and I spoke to a packed auditorium at San Diego Comic-Con, and were interviewed by one of YouTube’s most popular game streamers. When Roger and his fellow actor Rob Wiethoff made a surprise visit to my college class, game news site IGN broadcast the footage to millions of viewers. While this short-form public engagement often lacks the depth that academic scholars are accustomed to, it leads viewers toward a book that is very much a scholarly product, as Red Dead’s History is a synthesis of recent historiography in U.S. Western, Southern, and Appalachian history. And as early reader reviews indicate, new audiences are finding that scholarship is fresh and illuminating. As video games continue their astronomical growth in future decades, historical games will remain central to the medium. How will professional historians leverage this public passion toward serious study of the past? The future is wide open.

This article was originally published in “The Conversation” on 7.19.2024.

Title of course:
Red Dead’s History: Exploring America’s Violent Past Through the Hit Video Game

Q: What prompted the idea for the course?

This course was born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Confronting the lockdowns of 2020 and uncertain months spent at home, I rekindled a high school hobby that I had neglected for two decades – video gaming.

Picture of video game case — Used copy of Red Dead Redemption II. *Source: Not Even Past*

One of the first games I picked was “Red Dead Redemption II,” set in a fictionalized America of 1899. The game follows the Van der Linde gang, a diverse crew of idealistic outlaws, as they flee authority in an increasingly ordered and hierarchical world. Since its 2018 release, the game has sold more than 64 million copies, making it the seventh on the list of all-time bestselling video games – and the only historically themed one on the list.

While video games had been a mindless pastime in high school, this time around, I was playing as a professor who specialized in U.S. history since the Civil War. And though that made me a far more critical gamer, I was also genuinely surprised at how often RDRII – as it is often called – alluded to major topics that historians have spent generations debating.

These topics include corporate capitalism, settler colonialism, women’s suffrage, and the inequalities of race in an era that Mark Twain had called the “Gilded Age” – a period where the dazzling wealth of a small handful sharply contrasted with the misery of common people. These weighty topics were often on the game’s sidelines rather than at center stage – but they were present nevertheless.

Q: What does the course explore?

Given the centrality of violence to the video game, the course seeks to understand what really spurred bloodshed in the United States between 1865 and 1920.

In RDRII, gunfire is usually sparked by personal grudges, robberies, or the overconsumption of alcohol. But in Gilded Age America, it wasn’t so simple. Instead, broader social problems were the primary catalyst of violence. First, Americans fought over the emerging regime of corporate capitalism. Should new businesses like U.S. Steel and the Union Pacific Railroad, who wielded never-before-seen power and influence, dominate workers and consumers alike? Many resisted such an idea through protests, strikes, and sometimes bloodshed.

The Pullman Strike of 1894. Railroad workers who protested poor working conditions and low wages committed arson and destroyed property, which was followed by brutal state and federal law enforcement crackdown efforts.
*Image source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Secondly, Americans came to blows over the unfulfilled promises of racial equality that were written into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. Especially in the South, where the vast majority of African Americans lived, the formerly enslaved and their descendants demanded inclusion in politics and a chance to progress economically. But many white Southerners resisted such efforts, often using terrorism to push their Black neighbors into subservient positions.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

American society in the late 19th century was ruptured by inequalities wrought by capitalism and race – and so is ours today. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, it’s wise that we look back at the long road that brought America to its contemporary dilemmas of racial violence and the gap between rich and poor. A handy way to open that conversation with young Americans is through video games – an industry that has now surged in value to eclipse both music and movies and which might be the key to reaching this generation’s students, as studies are beginning to show.

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

One key lesson is about the city of New Orleans, fictionalized in RDRII as “Saint Denis.” In the game, the outlaw protagonists trade fire with the city’s blue-coated policemen following a botched bank robbery, leaving bodies in the streets. Few gamers could guess that a similarly bloody firefight with the police riveted the actual city in 1900, just a year after the game is set, leaving seven officers dead. Yet here the outlaw was a Black man, Robert Charles, who took a violent stand against police abuse and the emerging system of Jim Crow segregation.

In response to his attacks on the police, white mobs roamed the city and indiscriminately killed Black civilians. Therefore, the explosion of violence in New Orleans was produced not by simple banditry but by one of America’s towering social dilemmas.

Illustration in "The Mascot" newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. "Results of Police Outrage Investigations." — Illustration in “The Mascot” newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. “Results of Police Outrage Investigations.” The first panel of the cartoon entitled “As the Public See Him” shows a policeman with the head of a lion, waving a pistol and bloody billy-club over two prostrate bleeding bodies, as a citizen in the distance reacts in horror. The scond panel entitled “As the Committee Makes Him” shows policeman with the head of a lamb and angel wings, carrying a beribboned staff, exiting from a portal labled “Police Examining Committee” with a sign “Whitewashing Done Cheap”. A man with a top hat and cane looks on through binoculars.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Q: What materials does the course feature?

I frequently begin course sessions with a brief video cutscene or gameplay footage from RDRII before we dive into the actual history that the games represent – or sometimes, misrepresent. For reading, students dive into scholarly monographs such as historian K. Stephen Prince’s “The Ballad of Robert Charles,” on the violent dilemmas of race in New Orleans. They also read various original sources, such as cowboy memoirs, train schedules, and a Texas newspaper from 1899.

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

Anyone who has taken my class – or read my new book – will know that the big social problems we are wrestling with today have deep roots and took their modern shape during the same 1865-1920 period that is memorably captured in RDRII. They’ll also become much more discerning consumers of digital media and games in particular; they’ll be better able to assess and critique representations of history on the digital screen.

Tore Olsson, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tore Olsson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History at the University of Tennessee.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

15 Minutes History – US China relations in the 1970s

During the 1970s, relations between the US and China were transformed. Previously the two nations were cold war enemies. But Kazushi Minami argues that the ’70s saw Americans reimagine China as a country of opportunities, while Chinese reinterpreted the US as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country. Crucial to this process was “people’s diplomacy” the title of Minami’s book on US-China relations which focuses on how Americans and Chinese from all walks of life engaged in people-to-people exchanges across the realms of business, culture and sport. Minami teaches history at Osaka University in Japan.

15 Minutes History – The Court Packing Crisis

In 1937, American politics was gripped by President Roosevelt’s court-packing plan. Frustrated with what he perceived to be an aging, obstructionist Supreme Court, Roosevelt pressed Congress to expand the court from 9 to 15 members. Stepping into the ensuing maelstrom was Texas congressman Hatton Sumners, chair of the House judiciary committee, an ally of Roosevelt, and an opponent of the plan.

We’re joined today by Josiah Daniel. Now a full time legal historian, Daniel was a partner in the intl. law firm Vinson & Elkins. He received his JD in Law and MA in History from UT Austin.

15 Minutes History – Black Labor in Boston

The historian Henry Adams once wrote that, “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Changes during that period were indeed profound in Adam’s home town of Boston. And yet, for the majority of the city’s black men and women, life and work in 1900 were not that different from the 1850s — despite Boston’s proud progressive history.

We’re joined today by Professor Jackie Jones, whose new Pulitzer Prize-winning book “No Right to An Honest Living” traces the Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. Professor Jones’ book not only reconstructs black life — and indeed white hypocrisy — in compelling detail, it also shows the incredible value that labor history furnishes us with for understanding the past.

This is Democracy – Supreme Court Reforms

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Sanford Levinson to discuss the current state of the Supreme Court, recent efforts by Joe Biden to propose reforms, and how effective these proposals would be in practice.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “The Judges.”

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 450 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals–and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He has also written seven books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998, 2d ed. 2018); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (2015); Democracy and Dysfunction (with Jack Balkin) (2018); and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today (2017, 2d ed. 2019, graphic novel ed. 2020). Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2015, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (2016); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015); and Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2018). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

This is Democracy – Reforming Democracy

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Michael Ignatieff to discuss the current state of the institutions of democracy, how they are being questioned by some political movements, and how they can be reformed and strengthened.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “A Constitution of the Soul.”

Michael Ignatieff is a historian and the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He has served as rector and president of Central European University and is the author, most recently, of On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. Ignatieff published an important article this summer in the Journal of Democracy, “When Democracy is on the Ballot:”

This is Democracy – Political Violence

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Joanne Freeman to discuss political violence in the American political landscape from a historical perspective, and disperse some of the myths and misconceptions around it.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled “The War of Independence”

Joanne Freeman is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of two groundbreaking books on political violence in America history: Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. Prof. Freeman writes frequently for the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic. and other publications. She is a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, and other news networks. Her webcast — “History Matters (…& so does coffee!)” — can be joined every Friday morning at 10:00am EST:

This is Democracy – British Elections

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by William James to discuss the recent elections in Britain in the context of Brexit, Keir Starmer, and how they reflect the current state of democracy in Britain and beyond.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “Sonnet for Our Special Friends.”

Dr William D. James is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College, London. In 2024 he published British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony. Dr. James’ research has also been published in the European Journal of International Security, International Politics, War on the Rocks, and other journals. William earned a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in 2019.

This is Democracy – Supreme Court

Stephen Vladeck is professor of law at Georgetown University. He is the author of a New York Times bestselling book, The Shadow Docket. He publishes a widely-read newsletter on the Supreme Court, One First.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

Q: What materials does the course feature?

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

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