Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

As culture wars pit us against each other, A Great Disorder looks to the myths that have shaped American identity and reveals how they have brought us to the brink of an existential crisis.

Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two different countries, with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity.

A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Famous for his trilogy on the Myth of the Frontier, Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom. His argument is that while Trump and his MAGA followers have played up a frontier-inspired hostility to the federal government and rallied around Confederate symbols to champion a racially exclusive definition of American nationality, Blue America, taking its cue from the protest movements of the 1960s, envisions a limitlessly pluralistic country in which the federal government is the ultimate enforcer of rights and opportunities. American history--and the foundations of our democracy--have become a battleground. It is not clear at this time which vision will prevail.

Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

Sweeping...A new way to make sense not only of the past, but of the contemporary culture wars.
--New York Times Book Review

A provocative culmination of Slotkin's field-defining arguments on the place of violence in creating America. --Kathleen Belew

Brisk, bold, and thought-provoking. --Daniel Lazare, Arts Fuse

[An] exciting and detailed new decoder ring of a book...While it is usually hyperbolic to claim that a book will change your life, this one may well have a permanent effect on how you consume and think about American political news. --Tom Zoellner, Los Angeles Review of Books

Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two different countries, with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity.

A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Richard Slotkin identifies five key narratives that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (with dueling views of it as Liberation or the Lost Cause), and the Good War. Today, Slotkin argues, Trump and his MAGA followers play up a frontier-inspired hostility to the federal government and rally around Confederate symbols to champion a racially exclusive definition of American nationality; meanwhile, Blue America takes its cue from the protest movements of the 1960s, envisioning a limitlessly pluralistic country in which the federal government is the ultimate enforcer of rights and opportunities. With these opposing perspectives, American history--and the foundations of our democracy--has become a battleground. It remains to be seen which vision will prevail.

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

Wild West lore collides with a life of crime in this biographical novel of the legendary Cherokee outlaw.

Growing up on Indian Territory in Oklahoma, Henry Starr had an illustrious family lineage: half Cherokee warriors, half western outlaws. Inspired by dime-store novels and old family tales, he began robbing banks to avenge the bitter mistreatment of his people. But while Starr's criminal career soon made him a legend, it also won him a death sentence.

That was years ago, before a lucky twist of fate sets Henry free. But while the world has changed around him, the myth of the outlaw Henry Starr lives on. Now his best chance at a new life is to work in Hollywood--depicting his former self in silent films. As Henry is drawn into a glamorized version of his own past, it becomes difficult to separate truth from fiction. And he soon finds himself returning to the life that made him a notorious icon.

A fictionalized tale of Henry Starr's dramatic life, novelist and historian Richard Slotkin brings authentic period detail to this saga of the frontier.

A work of stunning density and penetrating analysis . . . Lost Battalions deploys a narrative symmetry of gratifying complexity.--David Levering Lewis, The Nation

During the bloodiest days of World War I, no soldiers served more valiantly than the African American troops of the 369th Infantry--the fabled Harlem Hellfighters--and the legendary 77th lost battalion composed of New York City immigrants. Though these men had lived up to their side of the bargain as loyal American soldiers, the country to which they returned solidified laws and patterns of social behavior that had stigmatized them as second-class citizens.

Richard Slotkin takes the pulse of a nation struggling with social inequality during a decisive historical moment, juxtaposing social commentary with battle scenes that display the bravery and solidarity of these men. Enduring grueling maneuvers, and the loss of so many of their brethren, the soldiers in the lost battalions were forever bound by their wartime experience.

Both a riveting combat narrative and a brilliant social history, Lost Battalions delivers a richly detailed account of the fierce fight for equality in the shadow of a foreign war.

In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy--one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society. In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin, a renowned cultural historian, reexamines the challenges that Lincoln encountered during that anguished summer 150 years ago. In an original and incisive study of character, Slotkin re-creates the showdown between Lincoln and General George McClellan, the Young Napoleon whose opposition to Lincoln included obsessive fantasies of dictatorship and a military coup. He brings to three-dimensional life their ruinous conflict, demonstrating how their political struggle provided Confederate General Robert E. Lee with his best opportunity to win the war, in the grand offensive that ended in September of 1862 at the bloody Battle of Antietam.

In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the savage element be permitted to dominate the civilized, Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

A classic selection of materials on Philip's War.

For the newly established New England colonies, the war with the Indians of 1675-77 was a catastrophe that pushed the settlements perilously close to worldly ruin. Moreover, it seemed to call into question the religious mission and spiritual status of a group that considered itself a Chosen People, carrying out a divinely inspired errand into the wilderness. Seven texts reprinted here reveal efforts of Puritan writers to make sense of King Philip's War. Largely unavailable since the 19th century, they represent the various divisions of Puritan society and literary forms typical of Puritan writing, from which emerged some of the most vital genres of American popular writing. Thoroughly annotated, the book contains a general introduction and introductions to each text.

The people of Greenhorns reflect the different ways Jewish immigrants took to America in the early 20th century, and how America affected them. A kosher butcher with a gambling problem. A Jewish Pygmalion. A woman whose elegant persona conceals the memory of an unspeakable horror. A boy who struggles to maintain his father's old-world code of honor on the mean streets of Brooklyn. The little man who wasn't there, whose absence reflects his family's inability to deal with its painful memories. An immigrant's son who discovers America -- its promise and its dark side -- as a soldier on leave in WW2. These tales recover the violent circumstances, the emotional and psychological costs of uprooting, which left the immigrant uncertain of his place in America, and show how that uncertainty shaped the lives of their American descendants.