My guest in this episode is Dr. Tore Olsson, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee.
Dr. Olsson’s first book, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, is an award-winning scholarly book. But his new book does something quite different. Titled Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and American’s Violent Past, the book opens a window on American history through the lens of Red Dead Redemption, the wildly popular video game franchise. I talked with Tore about how his pandemic video game habit changed the direction of his career, how teaching an undergraduate class on this topic shaped the book, and how working with his agent and editor made for a completely different publishing experience this time around.
In this episode:
- Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside
- Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and American’s Violent Past
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Evernote
- Lynn Sacco’s “Dolly Parton’s America” class at UT, which also inspired a podcast by the same name
- Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
- Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast all about writing history. My guest in this episode is Dr. Tore Olsson, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee.
Tore Olsson:
Thanks, Kate. It’s such a tremendous pleasure to be here.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. Olsson’s first book, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, was an award-winning scholarly book, but his new book coming out next month, August 2024, does something quite different, titled Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past, the book opens a window on American History through the lens of Red Dead Redemption, the wildly popular video game franchise. I talked with Tore about how his pandemic video game habit changed the direction of his career, how teaching an undergraduate class on this topic shaped the book, and how working with his agent and editor made for a completely different publishing experience this time around. Here’s my interview with Dr. Tore Olsson.
Tore Olsson:
I’ve always loved writing. So English is my second language, [inaudible 00:01:05] I think it’s kind of a quirky, important thing to grapple with. I was born and raised in Sweden, and did not really speak any English until I was about eight years old, when my family moved to the United States at that tender young age. But even before I learned English, I loved reading and writing in Swedish, and then once I moved over here I just had a tremendous passion for reading and writing, especially … I mean, it wasn’t good writing by any means. I wrote a lot of really crummy fantasy novels. I remember my first “book,” which was called The Isles of Dark Moon, which was very much self-published in 1996, I think I was in seventh grade, but it was like 75 pages long. I just loved writing, to me, it was infused with my love for Dungeons and Dragons, and these sorts of things.
So I always thought of myself as a writer growing up, as an aspiring writer, but the great irony is that when I started graduate school in history, I did more writing than ever before, and I also thought of myself less as a writer than ever before. It was this weird thing, where I’m spending so much time behind a blinking cursor on the screen, and so little time thinking of myself as actually a writer. I was thinking about myself as a scholar, as a historian, as a researcher, and writing seemed just like this utilitarian thing that got the evidence and argument on the page, when in fact that was kind of a sad way to think about it. But I just think, no offense to my graduate school mentors, but I just don’t think they really made me feel as a writer, that this was my primary pursuit. So it’s taken some time to get over that graduate school scholarification of my writing.
I think my first book, which is an academic book, which came out in 2017, was maybe there’s a grain of that storytelling impulse from my childhood, but it was also a very academic book that was aimed at academic readers. I’m very proud of that book, but I knew after finishing it that I didn’t quite want to do that again. I knew after finishing it that I wanted to write for a broader audience, academic and generalist readers, and I had the second project that I’d been working on for several years, which was about country music. It was essentially a global history of American country music, and how this American genre would find fans in unexpected parts of the world. But then the pandemic interrupted just about everything. I was ready to travel to the Philippines, and to Nigeria, and then came COVID, and instead of traveling the world, I stayed at home and I started playing video games, which is not at all what I would’ve expected myself to do.
The strange quirks of the pandemic move you in unexpected directions, and for me, video games was not entirely unknown, it was just something that I had done as a kid. In that same period when I was writing fantasy novels, I was playing video games. When I got to college, I really quit cold turkey. I really kind of gave up video games because it was doing me no favors academically or socially. I really just basically turned my back on the gaming world for 20 years. Between 2000 and 2020, I really didn’t play any video games, I was becoming a historian, and getting serious about things. But then in the pandemic I thought, “Well, why don’t we give this a try again?” I was very anxious about it. I was anxious that it would have a similar negative impact on my professional and social life in 2020 as it did in 1998, but it turns out that it would, in fact, have an impact, but somewhat of a positive one so far.
We’ll have to see what the long-term impact is, but it turns out that strange decision in 2020 to return to video games, just as a hobby, for fun, would actually have a tremendous impact on what I would do as a historian in the years following.
Kate Carpenter:
Let’s start with the basics. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Tore Olsson:
For my first and second books, end of dissertation, they were all written in exactly the same kind of place, my academic office on campus. It’s just like the only place that I’ve really figured out how to write, in my grad student office or in my faculty office. I’m a very nine to five kind of writer. You will never find me at 8:00 PM or 1:00 AM doing any writing whatsoever. It’s like very clockwork regulated. I need to be around my books, and I need to be around my really big monitors, because for my first book, which is much more primary source-oriented than my second book, all the sources I dealt with were digital. Anytime I came across something paper, I captured it digitally, whether with a phone or with a scanner, and I would use a huge database of sources. I found that just as when you’re working with paper sources, you need a really big table to encompass all that material, you need a lot of screen space when you’re working with digital materials.
Right now, I have a 65-inch TV screen that I use as my monitor at work, and that’s almost enough, maybe I should expand to two TV screens. So I really have to be in this professional place, it helps me feel serious, it helps me feel motivated, it keeps me on task. I feel like if I wrote anywhere else, in a coffee shop or at home, it would really … I wouldn’t have the same results, but then again, I’ve never really tried so I don’t know.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize yourself? How do you keep track of all your sources?
Tore Olsson:
The second book is just such a different beast than the first one. For the first one, which is again, much more of a monograph, I use EndNote. EndNote is my gold standard. I started it during comps, keeping track of my secondary sources when I was reading for exams, but then I quickly realized that it handles primary sources really well too, so I use EndNote religiously. For this second book, what this book is, Red Dead’s History, this new book that I’ve got coming out in August, it’s essentially a synthesis. It’s a synthesis of scholarship on the late 19th and early 20th century American West, South and Appalachia. It’s a synthesis then pinned to the narrative of one of the most popular video games of all time, and one that has enormous resonance with millions and millions of people around the world.
So essentially I’m trying to synthesize this body of historiography, but then translate it, if you will, into language that would be meaningful to, let’s say a 25-year-old video gamer, and hang it on hooks from the game that would perk their curiosity, in ways that most history books don’t. I mean, there’s lots of people who are not academics who read history books, but in many ways, I’m hoping this game will find readers who don’t otherwise buy history books, like people who haven’t read anything by someone with a PhD in history before. I’m hoping that there’s a set of blue ocean demographic of people who love history, who love video games, but just don’t have the, I don’t know, experience or background that they would go to a store and buy a book that was written by a professional historian.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you have a routine that you follow for writing? Do you write some every day?
Tore Olsson:
No. No. I always heard that advice, like, “You have to write at least a paragraph every day or you’ll grow out of it,” and I’ve definitely not followed that mantra. There’s been years, probably a year or two that I’ve gone without writing anything seriously, which is kind of shocking, and I always worry when I’m getting back into it like, “Have I lost my ability to do this?” Then I find out that no. It’s like riding a bike, you can actually remember how you do this, so I do not live by that mantra. But when I’m in my writing zone, when I’m fully dedicated to it, then I try to do it every day. It’s really my primary undertaking. When I was writing Red Dead’s History, I really wrote the core of it in nine months, just coming in and sitting down and pounding out words. What I’m really proud about this book too, is that I wrote it while teaching. I wrote it while in my regular service and teaching rotation, which my first book, I was on leave pretty much the whole time when I wrote it.
So I was able to focus almost entirely on that first book, but with the second one, and this is actually a very common pattern for historians, that writing that second book there is like, you’re doing service, you’re teaching, you may possibly have small children. All of them were true for when I wrote Red Dead’s History, but I nevertheless wrote it significantly faster than I did my first book, though it’s a very different kind of book, which kind of lent itself to a faster write. It also was, I had a kind of rough first draft of the book in a class that I had taught, which I know is something we should chat about in a little bit, about this link between teaching, and writing, and scholarship, which was very, very, a tight link for this book, much more so than anything I’ve ever done.
Kate Carpenter:
What does your revision process look like?
Tore Olsson:
I do it, I revise while I’m writing. I don’t know how common that is, but when I kind of run out of steam on putting new print on the page, I’ll often circle back and revise things that I’ve written previously. For me, it’s not like this two separate things, they’re intimately wound up with one another. I find it fun that way, that I get some ideas on the page, and then run out of steam or fizzle out, and then, “Okay, well, let’s go back to the paragraph before and tweak that around, and move some sentences around.” I don’t know, I found that works for me. It kind of helps me diversify what I’m doing, and keeps me from getting stuck in one action.
Kate Carpenter:
So I do want to talk about the origins of Red Dead’s History, which originated as a class. Interestingly, not the first time we’ve talked about a book like that on this podcast, but I’m really curious to know how did the process of teaching that class shape the writing of the book?
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, totally. So kind of in two ways. So just to circle back as to the story here. In 2020, I played this game, Red Dead Redemption 2, and I’m just playing it for fun as a hobby, but about halfway into the game, like 30 hours into the game, it’s a really long game, I had this epiphany that, “Wow, millions of college age people are fascinated with this game, why not try to teach a class on it?” With the understanding that someone else has done this before, and I go onto the internet and I quickly find that that’s actually not true. No one has tried to do this. In fact, searches in the core scholarly journals like the Journal of Southern History, the Western Historical Quarterly, the Journal of American History, a search for Red Dead Redemption 2 found absolutely nothing when I first did it in 2020. I was like, “Wow, scholars are just not engaging with this thing at all. Well, let’s give it a try.”
So I pitched this class to my highers up at the history department, then they said, “Well, we have no idea what this game is, but if you think students will sign up for it, then give it a shot.” So in late 2021, I taught this class for the first time, I called it Red Dead America, The Real History Behind the Hit Video Games, and much of the structure of this book that’s now coming out, came out of the wrestling I did really that summer in 2021, about how to structure this class. I decided to break the class up into geographical chunks, the American West, the Deep South, Appalachia, and Mexico, and then decided to choose topical lectures and discussions within those geographical groupings. Now, that’s not the only way you could have done this class, you could have done it a whole bunch of other alternative possibilities, but that’s what I decided on.
Now, the structure of the book is almost identical to that of the class, and that was maybe me trying to save time, but it was like the way I was thinking about it, it was grouped by region, and then by topic within it. It’s an imperfect grouping to be sure, but it’s what happened. The first way is that the topics or the chapters, the topics of the parts of the book, that all came out of the class. The other thing that really came out of the class most is my voice, is my authorly voice, because I realized, in this book, I wanted to write for college aged people, readers, not exclusively, I want to reach out some other folks, but I definitely want to reach that kind of core, late teen, early 20s demographic. For years, I thought that I couldn’t actually write for those people. I think a lot of academics have this concern that, “I don’t know how to make my work accessible to not just a generalist audience, but particularly a younger generalist audience.”
I had an epiphany too, during the class that, “Wait, of course I know how to reach these people. I reached them every single day when I’m teaching.” I do so orally rather than on the page, but there’s no reason that I can’t take my teaching voice, my teaching persona, and translate that into the page, that I can do that on the page. So that was the real moment of discovery that, “Wow, I’m just going to write it the way that I teach it,” which is a lot of shorter sentences, a lot of rhetorical questions, a lot of active verbs rather than passive verbs, a lot of colorful nouns and verbs, and just a lot of action, a lot of story, and a lot of those quirky anecdotes that make things resonate, those funny stories that may not be that meaningful, but that it can help prove a larger point. The book is, in many ways, quite similar to the class because it’s kind of like the page version of me in the classroom.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that. This is maybe not exactly about writing, but I was struck by when I read the book, that I got the impression, and I hear from you saying now too, that you didn’t get any pushback in your department, it seems like, in terms of whether this was an okay way to teach. But then I realized that you weren’t the first person in your department to teach a very culturally-based class. Your colleague, Lynn Sacco, who I think is retired maybe now, taught a class called Dolly Parton’s America, that also got a lot of attention. I’m struck by people sometimes talk about that undergraduate teaching done well is some of the best public history work that historians can do, because you have history majors of course, but you have many students who are not history majors, and may only encounter history in this course. How do you see that role as a historian?
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, absolutely. I really want this book to be public history, and I really want … I see this book as a very rare opportunity to serve as an ambassador for my discipline to people who don’t generally see us out in the wild. I want to translate all of the brilliance, and wit, and wisdom of the academic world to people who, like I mentioned before, who might not otherwise pick up a history book. I see this as a really, really potentially exciting field of public history, particularly hitched to the digital medium, digital public history that’s aimed for people on the internet, whether it’s through games, or through any kind of content that people are finding on their phones, on their computer screens, that’s, I feel like a vein that hasn’t been explored enough.
Public historians have really mastered the ways to put on an exhibition, and to interface with historical societies, and do so much of the public-facing work that public historians do, but the digital element, there’s digital history, but I find much of it is very scholarly-acing, very quantitative, very geographically-oriented, but not necessarily accessible to the hoards on the internet. What I’m hoping to do with this book, is that the book is to see if this digital public history thing is a possibility, if there’s actual hunger on the internet for real historical content that’s pinned to some of this digital pop culture that people are so obsessed with.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to talk a little bit about the difference of your experience in writing your two books, your first book and then this book. Like you’ve mentioned, your first book, Agrarian Crossings, was more traditionally academic, it’s published by an academic press. I think there’s more than a seed of your storytelling in that book. It’s quite clear, I think, reading it, that you take writing seriously, but I’m wondering, how did your writing and revision process change between those books? Do you see yourself as a different writer in the second book than the first book?
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, I see myself as a very different writer in the second book. You’re right, there’s kind of nuggets in the first book. I could tell I was trying to flex some of those muscles, but I think I was scared to. I think I was intimidated. I think the first book was really written … Here’s a metaphor that I’ve got in my head. I was leading with my shield, like I was writing defensively to those critics out there who I would need to prove myself in order to get good reviews, to get tenure, to do all this. I think I was leading with a shield, and my approach to the second book was really to be leading not with a shield, and not even with a sword, but with an extended hand, leading with a hand to grasp someone who wasn’t versed in what I’m doing, and who doesn’t know anything about what I’m writing about. So assuming no knowledge, and also assuming no prior interest, other than maybe in the video game, but I felt like I had not at all convinced someone to care about actual American history.
So you have to convert them, you have to convince them, and I don’t think a sword or a shield can actually do that. I think an extended hand is only the real way to win someone over because you come at them as an equal, “Hey, we both love this piece of pop culture, but let me show you how this can actually help you understand some of the biggest and toughest dilemmas in American history about race, and capitalism, empire,” all these things that pop culture really usually stays away from. I should say too, there’s a pink elephant in the room here, which is that I had help in writing the second book, in that I had a literary agent, and I had an editor at a trade press, who was a fundamentally different experience than my editor at an academic press.
I really have to give credit to my agent, Deborah Grosvenor, who’s amazing, because she is the one who really helped me find my voice. It was in the work of writing the proposal that I really had this wonderful back and forth with her. She loves history. She’s edited great history, and acquired great history stuff books before, but she’s not a history PhD, she’s not trained in this field, but she knows good prose, and she can help authors get there, and working with her on that back and forth really made a big difference. That’s what gave me the confidence that, “You know, I can do this,” and, well, I can do some things better if I learned to focus on them, figure out what muscles I need to build up, and actually work on them.
Then the experience of working with a trade editor too. I’ve had just absolutely amazing experience with Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who’s my editor at St. Martin’s. Just the level of wrestling with the pros that she had time to do, and had the will and desire to do, is something that academic presses who are understaffed in many ways, and under-resourced, even the biggest and fanciest, and most prestigious ones, they simply don’t have the ability to give text that kind of treatment. I don’t think I really could have done it without my agent and my editor, so I got to give credit to the kind of people whose names don’t appear on the cover, but who really played a crucial role in making the contents possible.
Kate Carpenter:
Absolutely. I love that. I am a big believer in the power of editors and their role in helping writers get to where they want to be.
Tore Olsson:
I love being edited by a good editor. I’m not defensive about that at all. A good, healthy working relationship between an author and an editor is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t always happen, I feel like it’s fairly rare, but when it clicks, it’s great, and I’m very much the beneficiary of that.
Kate Carpenter:
To take a closer look at how Tore’s voice and all that work of writing and editing came to life on the page, I asked him to read an excerpt from Red Dead’s History for us. Here’s Dr. Tore Olsson reading from the introduction to chapter three of Red Dead’s History, The Iron Horse, which focuses on railroads in the 19th century West, through the journeys of some of the game’s characters, the Van der Linde gang and Arthur Morgan.
Tore Olsson:
In their plight from authority and arrest, the Van der Linde gang treks across vast swaths of the West, from high mountainous reaches to the golden wheat fields of the Great Plains, yet they never truly outrun the railroad. In nearly every location, players grow accustomed to the billowing smoke of the locomotive, its shrill whistle in the seemingly unending expanse of iron track that crisscrossed the West. During his journey, Arthur Morgan grows familiar with multiple fictional railroad lines, the Central Union, the Southern and Eastern, the Lannahechee, and Midland, among others, and of course, key game missions take place in, on or near trains, either riding, robbing, derailing, or detonating them. Just as the gang cannot outrun the railroads, neither can they outrun railroad men.
In the opening hours of the game, our outlaw protagonists stage a daring robbery of a freight train on the Southern and Eastern line, whose owner is one Leviticus Cornwall. This proves to be a costly mistake, because Cornwall, the game’s resident robber baron, holds onto a grudge even more tightly than his money. The gang soon learns that Cornwall’s empire encompasses not only railroads, but a dizzying array of other industries. His name is stamped on kerosene refineries, oil derricks, sugar mills, city trolleys, and coal mines. Even worse, Cornwall has mayors, generals in the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in his back pocket. In his vengeful pursuit of the gang, Cornwall throws his wealth of resources into the fight, and the gang finds that they cannot elude the tentacles of this mighty octopus. The tycoon’s relentless war on the gang proves to be their undoing, in a testament to the concentrated power of gilded age capitalists.
Though Leviticus Cornwall is an invention of Red Dead Redemption 2, his archetypal character is not, railroad capitalists in his mold were not only real, but often larger than life. They were the stewards of America’s first mega corporations, overseeing economic empires of scale and scope never before seen in history, and they were the key architects of the harnessing of the West. In this chapter, we’ll explore the historical inspirations behind transcontinental railroads like the Southern and Eastern, and the flesh and blood men upon whom Leviticus Cornwall was based. We’ll see how the video game captures many of the realities of this era, particularly the ways that big business was entangled with politics and government.
But the railroad man of post-Civil War America were not the wily, all-powerful, evil geniuses suggested by Cornwall’s character, they were often incompetent, bumbling, and hopelessly corrupt men, who built their nation’s railroad network through their failure as much as their success. American corporate capitalism was born from the Western railroads, but as such, it had rather inauspicious beginnings.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, one of the things that I was really impressed by in this book, and I’ve spoken to other people who had the chance to read it early who said the same thing, but I have to imagine it was a challenge, was that … It’s really fun to read this book even if you don’t know the game, and even really gaming itself, how did you make sure that was the case? It must’ve been hard to balance explaining the game without boring people who already know the game.
Tore Olsson:
Yeah. Well, first off, Kate, the fact that you said you enjoyed it without having any exposure to the game is about the highest compliment that you could possibly pay to this book, because it was, as you mentioned, a great challenge, and something I, perhaps, still have a little bit of anxiety about, but it was something I tried to do. It was certainly something that my agent coached me to doing. She’s like, she said, “Sure, we want to reach the gamers, they are certainly a core demographic here, but there’s also a lot of people who love history books in this period, in these places you talk about, who haven’t played these games, and we don’t want to lose them. We don’t want to lose that demographic, and make this a sort of inside baseball club where only gamers can partake.” Thankfully, the plot of this video game, Red Dead Redemption 2, is really dramatic, and it’s a really great story. This game is problematic in many ways, but it’s kind of like an interactive HBO show that’s like 75 hours long, so it has really great characters, it has really great dialogue and acting.
It does the video game narrative form better than any other equivalent game that I’ve ever seen, so writing about the story was fun to do, and of course, I’d played the game several times, so distilling the key plot elements was fairly fun to do. But the concern was, and I was doing a lot of this for those uninitiated readers who had not had the experience of playing the games, now I wondered, “Was this going to bore the hardcore gamers who have sunk 500 hours into this game?” Much more than me. We’ll see what plays out when more and more gamers read it, but folks who really love this game, they also love reading about it. They’ve spent many, many hours reading much worse prose about this game on the internet, on walkthrough sites, on review sites. Having a decent writer narrate the key elements I don’t think it would actually bore them, I think they would enjoy it. It’s kind of a return to a cozy place, to cozy memories for them, maybe nostalgic in some ways.
Another thing that I did too, is that when I was … I’ve talked already about the kind of unacknowledged people who don’t get credit for this, I had undergraduate student readers of this manuscript, and of my proposal, two students, two particularly bright students from my class who loved this idea it was becoming a book. I asked them if they would be interested in reading the manuscript, and they’re like, “Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Let me give you my feedback.” So they’re both gamers, they both knew it quite well, and none of them expressed like, “Well, Dr. Olsson, I really get tired of reading about Red Dead Redemption.” It was more like, “Can we hear more about Red Dead Redemption in these chapters?” So I had multiple demographics.I sent the manuscript to many other scholars, none of whom had played the game for that other view, is this accessible and interesting if you’re not a gamer? They also gave positive affirmation that, “It made me want to play the game.”
My editor, for example, she’s never played the game, she’s learned a lot about it from this book, but ultimately, the video game content is not the primary show here. The primary show is the serious historical narrative that’s anchored in the plot line of the game is ultimately the main thing, not the game narrative. You can buy books about Red Dead Redemption 2 about the cover-up, all the intricacies of the plot, but that’s not really what I’m trying to do of course with this.
Kate Carpenter:
It is true though, I’m not a gamer, but I did find myself Googling what do I need to play Redemption 2 when I finished this. Rockstar Games owes you a thanks, I think in that regard. I’m interested that you had undergraduate readers, because I was wondering as I’m reading it, in some ways the chapters feel a little bit like that kind of rare history lecture, where it’s just like it’s so good, some brilliant, but fun teacher is teaching you. What was the process like of trying to sort of convert classroom lectures into book form?
Tore Olsson:
It was definitely not a copy and paste thing to be sure. Now, when I teach, it’s kind of embarrassing, I probably shouldn’t even reveal it to the world, but when I teach I really, for every class, not just this one, when I give lectures, which I do fairly frequently, I write out the whole lecture word for word. I have a script that is, I mean, it’s almost entirely complete. I never ever read from it in class, but before class I practice it so that I basically don’t need the script at all. I look at it very rarely during the lecture, but I did coming out of the class, I did have documents that had, I don’t know, three, 4,000 words in them on each of the lecture topics, which generally became chapter topics. However, those lectures were written for the ears rather than the eyes, and as any writer I think knows, those are two very different things, and what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other.
So I was retooling them to make them for the eyes, and of course, you read with the eyes very differently, you can go back, you can reread things, it’s not the same as sitting in a lecture hall where there’s no rewind button and no pause button. So I changed a good deal of the style, but I wanted to retain the most punchy stories and anecdotes, and descriptions that I would use in the class, so I definitely didn’t toss out the baby to the bathwater. It was more kind of adapting it to a different format, and I think it’s fairly successful. I don’t know. I think the students who’ve taken my class read the book, they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that day.” It won’t feel dramatically different from what I did in the classroom, but kind of leading … When you write for the ears, you tend to place your subjects at the very beginning, and then the modifying adjectives and nouns at the end, but you could be a little more playful with that when you’re writing for the eyes.
However, one thing that, well, kind of extra wrinkle, is that many of the readers of this book may actually be listening to it ultimately, because there will be an audiobook of Red Dead’s History that comes out simultaneously with the print version. The really fun fact here is that the narrator of the audiobook is Roger Clark, the name Roger Clark may not mean anything to most historians, but they mean a lot to the gamers because Roger Clark is the actor who plays the main character in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Kate Carpenter:
Oh, my gosh.
Tore Olsson:
He’s the voice of Arthur Morgan, who is the protagonist, so this book will be read by the main actor of the game.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s so cool.
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, I’m just so thrilled. I’m just giddy with enthusiasm and excitement, because not only he is a great actor, and he’s actually done multiple audiobooks previously, but his voice is just so powerfully resonant for the tens of millions of people who played the game. I’m just honored that he wanted to partner and be a part of this project. My bet is that I may actually have more listeners of this book than actual readers, and I hope that the fact that it’s written for the eyes doesn’t do too poorly when it is heard on the ears, as it was originally kind of concocted as a class, but we’ll find out. I think Roger will just work magic with words no matter what. I’m so glad he’s reading it, and not me. You have me read just a page and a half, and Roger would’ve done a million times better job of that.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, yeah, I think it’ll be great. This book is a pleasure to read. It’s relatively quick-moving. It’s fun, but it’s also really nuanced. It really covers serious history well. I think a lot of historians who are familiar with the topic will have the fun experience I did of reading it, and sort of recognizing what books things come from. Anyway, that balance is really fascinating, that it’s both nuanced and rich, but doesn’t lose sight of the fun of what you’re doing. What did it take to strike that tone, to keep that balance?
Tore Olsson:
Well, first off, I’m really thrilled that my publisher allowed me to have footnotes and notes, because for a lot of trade books they like to cut those out, and just don’t want to litter the text with these unnecessary superscript numbers, but I was pretty firm. I was like, “I really, really would like to have this.” I think it’s important for the historians who see those echoes, “Let’s check who is Olsson working with here,” like, “Oh, okay, these are familiar books,” but of course I’m bringing them together in unusual ways. I don’t know, I feel like I kind of settled that balance when I was teaching the class, because then I’d also decided, “Well, I have to teach them serious stuff. They have to take exams on this. What kinds of big dilemmas can I broach?” I tended to favor topics that allowed me to get at big picture stuff.
For example, I feel like there’s only really one chapter of this book that doesn’t connect solidly with the big social, political, cultural dilemmas of the day, and that is a chapter on Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch. This outlaw gang, real outlaw gang that undoubtedly provided the inspiration behind the core gang in the game vis-a-vis the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this 1960s movie, which the game kind of rips off in a lot of ways. I wanted for the gamers to have a chapter on this gang. Writing about real outlaws, I had more difficulty connecting that chapter with corporate capitalism, and the Jim Crow regime, so it’s a little fluffier on that count. But for all of the other chapters, you’ll come right back to topics that every graduate student studies for cops, core dilemmas that scholars tend to emphasize, in that sometimes they kind of pop history at the airport does not really play to.
But I am a historian through and through, I can’t shake the decades of training that have gone in here. I think things are interesting when they shed light on those broader dilemmas that transcend just, “Oh, well, who is Arthur Morgan in the Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch?” Well, I don’t really care about that all that much because it’s like, “S what?” But I know readers will, which is why I included that chapter, but it was never a lecture in the class. I didn’t want to dive into the kinds of amateur history of, “Well, let’s compare one character to another,” unless there’s some kind of bigger meaning behind it.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to move a little bit and talk about some of your inspirations. I know that we’ve talked a little bit about some of the other readers that you had for this book. Are there people generally you rely on for feedback on your writing?
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, I sent it to scholars, to friends, and colleagues, who I also admired as writers as well, people who could straddle that academic and trade popular, public-leaning markets. But then I also send it to people who really were just experts in the main subjects that I was studying. So for a trade press book like this, there’s no formal anonymous peer review in the way that there is for a university press, as I’m sure you know, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t eyes on this manuscript. I asked lots of folks beforehand to go through an informal peer review process, which was very, very helpful, and really changed the book a great deal.
Then it’s fascinating too, one thing that I didn’t know before I did this, and it may just be a quirk of this particular publisher, but there’s no formal peer review, but that’s not to say that there’s no eyes on the manuscript, tons of people who are reading this thing, fact-checkers. I mean, fact-checkers, first off, my first book never got fact-check. There wasn’t anyone in my academic publisher who was doing that. It was really all the labor was on the peer reviewers, who are imperfect creatures who do this in the strange ways that our discipline functions. But the numbers of readers that this manuscript got in the production process was much, much higher, I mean multiple rounds of proofreading, and copy editing, and fact-checking. Copyright lawyers read it very closely to make sure that we weren’t getting into hot water, especially given that we’re writing about this very popular game that’s made by this very large and very litigious company. So there were lots of eyes on it, but yes, there’s no formal peer review, but I kind of got that through my own process before submission.
Kate Carpenter:
Who are some of the writers that you read as inspiration as a writer?
Tore Olsson:
I think there were really two books that I was trying to imitate perhaps in writing this one, two books that I often teach because I just love reading and rereading them. One is Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. Daniel’s a close friend of mine, and I’ve been in touch with him for many, many years, and seeing what he was able to do with that book, which was both synthetic and had lots of new research in it, but then truly was accessible in ways that trade history books are not always. He really wrote in this punchy, and of high octane style that really won readers over that might not have picked up your average Norton or basic trade crossover academic history book. So it was great to have Daniel be a part, and Daniel provided a blurb for the book too, which I’m very honored and thrilled to have. This other book is one that I’ve probably taught more than any other, which is Karl Jacoby’s The Strange Career of William Ellis, which is this book.
Kate Carpenter:
It’s a good one.
Tore Olsson:
Oh, you know this one too?
Kate Carpenter:
Mm-hmm.
Tore Olsson:
That book is just so brilliant, so beautiful. Again, it sheds so much light on dilemmas in the United States, in Mexico, about race and the transnational ambiguities of it, and it’s such a great story. I think what I really love in history books is a story that has characters in action, and one that means something, a story that changes my view of a topic that I previously believed was important, but I clearly misunderstood beforehand. It’s kind of like what I want from all scholarship nowadays, I’m sometimes disappointed, to be honest.
We had two job searches at my university this year, so we have gone through a lot of job talks, I think for all of them I’m very curious to hear a story that has action and narrative, but then changes my view on something that I really didn’t previously understand all the way. I’m very proud that both the people we extended offers to did exactly that, so that’s what I’m looking for in scholarship in writing stories. I think there’s sometimes a sense that stories are simple, and that’s not something historians should lean into, that it’s moving backward, and I don’t agree with that. I think that stories can be rich and nuanced and complex, and if we lack a story, then we lack an ability to persuade people of what we’re talking about.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that this interview has not only craft conversation, but also job talk advice.
Tore Olsson:
It’s kind of the same thing in many ways.
Kate Carpenter:
It’s true.
Tore Olsson:
There’s a lot of parallels.
Kate Carpenter:
Absolutely. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Tore Olsson:
I think it was my editor, I’m sorry, my agent, telling me like, “Be confident you got this, you can do it,” doing things that I never tried to do, and just experimenting. I kind of found myself leaning back into my 1996 Isles of Dark Moon mode when I’m using language, some of that kind of dramatic language that I was using in the excerpt that I read, that felt more like the Tore of 1996 than the Tore of 2016, to be sure. I loved writing this book. This book was so much. I mean, I loved writing my first book too, but I really, really enjoyed, like I would be eager to go to campus and sit down and work because it was just fun. I mean, not every day, there were some tough days, to be sure. I don’t mean to pretend that it’s all sunshine and roses, but for the most part it was really a blast.
I think my own passion for the game, having enjoyed playing the game and being able to narrate moments of it, I felt very lucky to be able to spend time doing that, and relating it to the grand important stories of American history too.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that you were able to bring different parts of yourself to the writing, and to this book.
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, before I let you go, I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on next, which I know is kind of unfair since this book is just coming out, but I know you have another project in the works.
Tore Olsson:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as soon as I finished my first book, Agrarian Crossings, I began work on also trade-oriented book about country music, which I mentioned a little bit previously, a global history of American country music. It’s how it followed the sort of conduits of American military power through the US military bases, and radio broadcasting, and state department cultural tours, how this music that most people think of just as innately American, and something that did not travel well, in fact, won over millions and millions of fans in really surprising parts of the world, from West Africa to East Asia, and the Caribbean and beyond. I had a big head of steam on that project, and was making headway on it until the pandemic interrupted everything. It had always been my assumption that once this second book, the video game history book was done, that I’ll return to the country music project.
However, I had so much fun working on this book that I’m not quite a 100% ready to say, “Okay, well, that was just an aberration, that was just a distraction, now it’s time to go back to my usual fare.” I kind of want to wait to see how things go. Essentially, two months after this book comes out, I’m going to make a decision. Am I returning to the country music project, of which I already have so much research for, or will I continue writing about history and video games? If there’s an audience, if there’s an interest, and this is a great experiment, this may be a total flop, or it may not be, I have no idea, this is kind of a gamble, but if the gamble proves to have some value, then it’s possible that I teach another class on video games and history, moving more into the 20th century, which is really my traditional bread and butter.
My idea has been to look at several games, not just one, but several games, maybe three or four, as snapshots of 20th century America, and use them to narrate a broader, sort of century-long history of the nation, and its international entanglements through a handful of also popular games. But I’m going to lay back and see what happens with this experiment first.
Kate Carpenter:
Excellent. I love that. Well, Dr. Tore Olsson, thanks so much for joining me to talk about your writing process. This has been great.
Tore Olsson:
Thanks, Kate. It’s been such a delight to be here, and I really appreciate the invitation to join.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks again to Dr. Tore Olsson for joining me on this episode of Drafting the Past. Red Dead’s History comes out on August 6th, 2024, and you can pre-order it now wherever you like to buy books. You’ll also find a pre-order link, and links to everything Tore and I talked about in this episode at draftingthepast.com. Thanks for listening and joining me in the good fight, the belief that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
