History professor Tore Olsson will use Red Dead Redemption 1 and Red Dead Redemption 2 for a course to be held at the University of Tennesse this fall. Olsson, passionate about gaming as well as history, presented the course “HIUS 383: Red Dead America” on Twitter. The teacher said that the two Rockstar Games titles are "often historically inaccurate" but provide many insights into colonialism, racism and the rise of capitalism.
The course will cover the period from 1899 to 1911, and topics such as the myth of the border, the expansion of monopoly capitalism and the use of railways for the growth of corporate power.
There will also be space for the memory of the civil war, universal suffrage, the roots of the American melting pot with the fusion of foreign populations such as Mexicans, Chinese, Italians and Germans, but also the privatization of the police forces through the Pinkerton case.
Unfortunately, the places for Olsson's lessons will be very limited (just 35) but the professor reserves the right to work to increase them in case he collects a lot of subscriptions.
Who says video games don’t belong in the classroom? I’m a history professor at @UTKnoxville. This fall, I’ll be teaching a new course titled “HIUS 383: Red Dead America,” exploring the historical reality behind @RockstarGames’ series. What kinds of topics will we be exploring? /1 pic.twitter.com/wkaHSvz4E4
— Tore Olsson (@ToreCarlOlsson) February 11, 2021
As stated by the professor, there will be other topics present in the course, let's see them all in detail:
- The astounding inequalities in wealth that became obvious during the Gilded Age
- Settler colonialism and the dispossession of Native peoples
- The making of Jim Crow racial violence in the South
- The Mexican Revolution and its transnational impacts
- The memory of the Civil War and the making of the Lost Cause myth
- Women’s suffrage and its opponents
- The American empire and the expansions of 1898
- The cosmopolitanism of the American population, including Chinese, Mexican, Italian, and German immigrants, among others
- Stereotypes of Appalachian degeneracy and poverty alongside the reality of corporate extraction and dispossession
- The privatization of law enforcement via the Pinkerton detective agency
These are really the things we like to see; when video games have an impact on real modern culture. On the other hand, it is not new that video games have long been considered a real cultural media. What do you think about it?
