It is 1899. Arthur Morgan, along with other members of the infamous Dutch Van der Linde gang, are ready to tackle the “Old West,” “Deep South,” and “Southern Appalachia,” where they survive bloody shootouts, dodge law enforcement, and face off against rival gangs. No matter the exact scenario, Morgan’s actions are judged by the “honor gauge,” a “linear sliding scale” weighing right from wrong. Morgan, however, does not make his own decisions. He is not – nor was he ever – a real person. Instead, Morgan is the lead character in Red Dead Redemption II, a video game released in 2018. Author Tore C. Olsson initially encountered Morgan, as so many others did, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike most players, however, Olsson became convinced of the educational potential of Red Dead Redemption II, and, in August 2021, he launched an experimental course, “Red Dead America: The Real History Behind the Hit Video Game,” at the University of Tennessee. The class became an overnight internet sensation and proved to be “an absolute blast” for his students (xii). “Why should the journey I had taken my students on be limited to those enrolled at the University of Tennessee? Why not share our adventure with the larger world,” he wondered (xii). This engaging publication is the product of his successful experiment.

Divided into three sections – the “Old West,” “Deep South,” and “Southern Appalachia” – this book uses the journey of the fictional Morgan to explore key aspects of American history from 1865 to 1900. Each of the book’s twenty chapters, averaging about ten pages each, delves into a specific and narrowly focused historical event, person, movement, or historiographical topic. The opening chapter of the first section explores Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and unpacks the meaning of the West as a site of historical study. Other chapters examine indigenous warfare, the railroad’s westward expansion, the rise of the beef-packing industry in Chicago and its effects on western lands, the role of mass-produced firearms in late nineteenth-century political violence, the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and the dramatic career of the Wild Bunch. Throughout, Olsson relies on the latest secondary scholarship to offer nuanced comparisons between Red Dead Redemption II and the historical record.

Following the game’s narrative arc, the book’s second section considers racism and violence in the postbellum South. It opens with a clear discussion of race as a socially constructed concept and then proceeds into a consideration of the diversity of characters encountered in the game. In subsequent chapters, Olsson expertly unpacks the meaning of the Old South and the New South, the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, the changing nature of agricultural production and the harsh realities of sharecropping, the exploitive aspects of the South’s judicial system and the racialized reality of the convict leasing system, the gradual development of Jim Crow era segregation, the mythology of the Lost Cause, and the racial and ethnic diversity of New Orleans. Although the game only obliquely alludes to lynching, Olsson devotes a full chapter to this violent southern custom and uncovers the myriad motivations behind white mob action. The final chapter in the section provides a short but thorough history of the suffrage movement, grounded in the game’s portrayal of Gilded Age feminists and the opportunities it offers players to aid or oppose their struggle for voting rights.

Turning northward into Appalachia, the book’s final three chapters critically interrogate the longstanding myths and negative stereotypes of poor rural whites. As Olsson notes, “even as the American public has grown more sensitive in recent years to displays of discrimination and bias, there remains an underlying opinion that the mockery of poor, rural whites, particularly from the southern mountains, is the ‘last acceptable prejudice’” (207). Spanning just thirty-two pages, this short section begins to unpack the complicated history of this misunderstood region. Using an ideological framework that he calls the “scramble for Appalachia,” Olsson rightly reconsiders southern Appalachia as a region victimized by the exploitive plunder of northeastern capitalism (220).

Although clearly a fan of Red Dead Redemption II, the author does not hesitate to note the game’s shortcomings while still lauding its considerable merits. In the end, Olsson concludes, “when we balance the ledger book of good and bad, the game ultimately does far more to advance historical understanding than not … It opens doors, even if it doesn’t always guide players through them; it sows curiosity and passion for richer understandings of America’s past” (242). Rarely does one describe an up-to-date academic synthesis as a fun read, but Olsson’s Red Dead’s History is truly a fun and engaging book. It is able to stand alone as a piece of historical scholarship, and selective chapters could be assigned to students unfamiliar with the video game. In an upper-division classroom, the work could also be paired alongside the video game for an intensive and unique classroom experience. Red Dead’s History covers a wide range of topics in an extremely accessible manner, and undergraduate students will be lucky to encounter this book – in its entirety or as a few excepted chapters – in their college classrooms.