In his youth, Tore Olsson was an avid gamer, playing such titles as Warcraft, Starcraft, and Half-Life for long stretches at a time. College led to a different kind of vocation, however – history – and Olsson traded in his joystick and controller for a Ph.D. from University of Georgia, leaving his gaming days permanently behind him.
Or so he thought. During the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Olsson again ventured into gaming but instead of finding himself in the fantasy world of Azeroth or fighting an intergalactic war at the edges of the Milky Way, Tore Olsson was transported to the western frontier of the United States and the year 1899. The video game was Red Dead Redemption II, and it not only reinvigorated Olsson’s love for gaming from his youth but dovetailed with his adulthood passion for history.
Red Dead Redemption II – released by Rockstar Games in 2018 – follows the adventures of outlaw Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang as they make their way from the American West to the Great Plains, onto the American South and then the Appalachian Mountains, and serves as a prequel to 2010’s Red Dead Redemption.
During the game, Arthur Morgan encounters African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women that defy typical stereotypes, as well as the Suffragette movement, displacement of Native Americans, and the Ku Klux Klan.
“It was halfway into my playthrough that a big idea struck me,” Tore Olsson later recalled. “For millions of fellow gamers who bought and played the Red Dead Redemption titles, these might be their only exposure to turn-of-the-century American history. Hence, my big idea: why not try teaching a serious college history class that built on student enthusiasm and knowledge of both games and used their fictionalized content as a springboard for tackling some of the trickiest topics in the history of North America from 1880 to 1920? To my great surprise, no other historian had tried this before.”
The subsequent course was entitled “Red Dead America: The Real History Behind the Hit Video Game” and launched during the fall of 2021 at the University of Tennessee. Sixty students enrolled for the class, twice the usual number for an upper-division history course.
Each week of the semester, Tore Olsson would begin by describing an aspect of the fictional history contained within Red Dead Redemption II to give the discussion context, and then spend the bulk of the class lecturing on the real world history that it represented. Assignments likewise contained comparisons of the fictional with the factual, such as dissecting the front page of the New Hanover Gazette from the game and that of a factual Texas newspaper from 1899.
In many ways, the course was a hit well before the fall semester even began. Olsson had announced his intentions via a Tweet in February that went viral, resulting in press coverage on everything from gaming outlet GameSpot to Smithsonian magazine.
Between the publicity and success of the course, Olsson decided to write a history book that followed the same format as “Red Dead America: The Real History Behind the Hit Video Game,” published in 2024 under the title, Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past.
Red Dead’s History is divided into three parts – The West, The Deep South, and Southern Appalachia – with a handful of chapters within each on specific topics. Like with his course at the University of Tennessee, Tore Olsson begins each chapter with a brief overview of Red Dead Redemption II’s connection to the topic before moving on and spending the bulk of his time on the factual history with which it corresponds.
As Olsson notes early on, Red Dead Redemption II is often off plus-or-minus a few decades for each subject that the game explores. When the Van de Lind gang reaches the fictional southern state of Lemoyne, for instance, Arthur Morgan stumbles upon a dozen hooded men wearing long white robes who subsequently set a large wooden cross on fire. While these men obviously represent the Ku Klux Klan, both their presence in 1899 and the burning of a cross do not correlate with the factual history of the South.
According to Tore Olsson, the Ku Klux Klan were initially founded in the spring of 1866 as a “social group” for Southern males grappling with the outcome of the Civil War. It wasn’t until February 1867 that the loosely-knitted organization turned to terrorism against African Americans and their white supporters in a campaign against Black suffrage. The Klan’s high profile, however, made them targets of the federal government, U.S. Army, and Republican governors in the South, and by 1869 they no longer existed – thirty years before Arthur Morgan stumbled upon them in Lemoyne.
This first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, meanwhile, never burned wooden crosses. It wasn’t until 1915 – sixteen years after the events of Red Dead Redemption II – that a cross was set ablaze on Stone Mountain in Georgia by a group of white men intent on resurrecting the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century.
Despite such inconsistencies, Tore Olsson still believes in the power of Red Dead Redemption II as stepping stone to understanding factual U.S. history in the late nineteenth century.
“Even after three playthroughs, it was difficult to believe that a game played by more than fifty million people broached subjects like the crusade for woman’s suffrage in the U.S. South, the place of the bison in the ecological struggle for the Great Plains, and the fallacy of eugenicist ideology,” he writes in Red Dead’s History.
He then adds, “It is an undeniable testament that video games can be historically thoughtful and commercially successful. 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.”
And in the hands of Tore Olsson, Red Dead Redemption II provides the perfect subtext for exploring America’s past in the college classroom, while likewise setting the stage for similar endeavors by other historians across the country as well.
Anthony Letizia