Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past

During the peak of the COVID lockdown, Olsson (history, Univ. of Tennessee; Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside) felt an urge to return to the digital realm of historical video games. Red Dead Redemption II was his choice. Set in a fictionalized West of 1899, it featured a bunch of idealist bandits under Arthur Morgan, a lieutenant in Dutch Van der Linde’s gang. Morgan’s henchmen are the last gasp of anarchy in an age of expanding hierarchy and control, roaming across the Great West, Deep South and Appalachia, and briefly the Caribbean. The game addresses issues such as women’s suffrage, railroad capitalism, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the Pinkertons as strike breakers, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. When classes resumed, Olsson used the game to teach his students—more video game savvy than history savvy—about the conflicts that convulsed the U.S. between 1865 and 1920. He used their enthusiasm for the game to draw them into an exploration of broad themes in American social history. It turned out to be an attractive way to mine history without trivializing it.