KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A University of Tennessee professor said he uses popular culture to teach his United States history class by finding unique ways to hook his students into the topic, before beginning his lectures.
Tore Olsson has taught at UT for around 11 years and has a passion for American history. In 2021, he started using Red Dead Redemption 2 as a springboard to teach his students about America’s past.
“Usually, I’ll begin the class by discussing the game and how it portrays a certain subject,” said Olsson. “Then we will thread outward and think, 'Okay what was the actual history of this period?' And then we will touch on how closely does that mirror what's on the digital screen.”
The idea started during the COVID-19 Pandemic when Olsson said he realized the video game paralleled American history while playing it. Red Dead Redemption 2 follows Arthur Morgan, a cowboy journeying through a fictionalized American landscape with a band of criminals as the country begins to turn away from the frontier and works towards modernization.
“The game would touch on some of the biggest questions American historians would debate when we think about the so-called Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”
Olsson said he plays short clips from the video game in class, which spurs that day’s lecture topic. Sometimes, he will even take the students inside the video game to compare how the game portrays certain decades against the realities of those stories, such as racial segregation in 1899.
“I walked students through this fictional city in the game, looking for these visual markers of segregation. And I did not find them in the game, so the class was about exploring whether that would be accurate or not," said Olsson.
Non-history students can learn U.S. history the same way, through Dr. Olson’s new book, "Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past."
“The biggest thing I want people to away from my book has to do with the question of violence,” said Olsson. “I want people to recognize what drove violence during that period is different than what drove violence in the video game.”
The book is available in Knoxville bookstores like Union Ave. Books and Barnes and Noble. It's also available online or as an audiobook on streaming services.