“Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history,” wrote the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952. At that time, just seven years after the end of World War II, he and others were asking about the character of the nation that had risen to worldwide leadership. Niebuhr believed that nations were made of their histories, contrived or factual, and that “every nation has its own form of spiritual pride…. Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.” Yet, he noted, “we are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears…which lie at the foundation of their political cohesion.” A total war among nations had made the idea of a nation more pertinent than ever.

Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity.¹ Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity. These subjects—many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors—have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States. But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole? If historians don’t, advocates of “patriotic” history will do that work for us.²

Two distinguished American historians, Edward Ayers and Richard Slotkin, have written quite different books that bring the nation back into full focus. In American Visions, Ayers, one of our greatest scholars of the South and the Civil War, argues that to understand this nation readers must search for its roots in the period from 1800 to 1860, a time of enormous growth, expansion, and conquest alongside a surging slave society that put the entire country in peril. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin, our most prolific scholar of national myth, examines the concepts that, he contends, Americans have, knowingly or not, used to understand themselves and act in the world, often violently. Both books were written before the 2024 election, yet they have much to tell us about our current crisis of severe polarization as well as the assaults on the historical professions and cultural institutions by the Trump administration.

Ayers is a professor of humanities at the University of Richmond, where he also served for eight years as president. Originally from the South, he got his start in American studies during the 1970s, training under the cultural and intellectual historian David Brion Davis at Yale. One of Ayers’s early books, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992), was a major attempt at a revision of C. Vann Woodward’s classic, Origins of the New South (1951).³ Ayers brought a literary, cultural, and racial emphasis to understanding the transformations of the South of the 1870s–1890s, forged by commerce, railroads, black and white culture, and violence.

Ayers has also been a pioneer in digital history. In the 1990s he created the website the Valley of the Shadow, an ambitious in-depth social history of two communities during the Civil War—Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania—that shared roughly the same ethnic background, landscape, and economy, except that one was a slave society and the other free. That project led to two prize-winning books, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America (2003) and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (2017), as well as digital teaching resources that forever changed how the Civil War is studied.

“I am an optimistic person who has written and taught about the worst wrongs in American history—slavery, war, violence, injustice—for forty years,” Ayers writes in the preface to American Visions. “I have done so believing that by addressing those evils we can perceive and counter their insidious legacies.” Yet, he continues,

it is sometimes hard to sustain that optimism when ugly scenes from the new United States reappear: nativists and racists march, apocalyptic prophecies and conspiracies proliferate, and religious faith is wielded as a political weapon. Those who would rule the United States with such purposes claim the sanction of history…. They seek control over history, expunging evidence of injustice in the name of national pride.

What Ayers offers readers is the opportunity “to remember a fuller American history, one that is more truly patriotic, one that evokes the nation’s highest ideals of equality and mutual respect in the face of the nation’s failings.” He does this by focusing on the “bold men and women” who, during the volatile period from Thomas Jefferson’s election to Abraham Lincoln’s,

spoke without permission and often in defiance of those who held power…evoked humane understanding in speeches, novels, paintings, and songs…deflated pretension and hypocrisy…wrote with care of the beauty and fragility of the natural world. Their visions remain powerful—and necessary—generations later.

Each chapter of Ayers’s fascinating, wide-ranging book consists of a series of vignettes about presidents, former slaves, indomitable women, slaveholders, scam artists, religious eccentrics, Native American heroes, whalers, Mormons, and tellers of tall tales as well as great poets. His pages are populated with everyone from James and Dolley Madison to Johnny Appleseed, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. He credits the journalist Margaret Fuller with giving to posterity the modern notion, in her 1845 manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century, that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” and thus women’s ambitions should in no way be limited. (“If you ask me what offices they may fill,” she wrote, “I reply—any…let them be sea-captains, if you will.”) At an event in support of the Underground Railroad, the freeborn Black poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper read out her 1858 poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” inspiring a listener to observe that “there swept over me, in a chill wave of horror, the realization that this noble woman…might have been sold on the auction-block, to the highest bidder.”

Ayers also dives into the stories of Native peoples who fought to resist white incursion into their lands and lives. Along with famous military leaders like Tecumseh and Osceola he includes writers and thinkers, among them Elias Boudinot, Sequoyah, and William Apess. Boudinot was born in Georgia to a Cherokee father and a white mother, and educated by missionaries in Connecticut, where he took the name of a Founding Father who supported their work. In the late 1820s he joined Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee writing system (and himself the son of a Cherokee woman and a white man), to document the Native struggle as a coeditor of the bilingual newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate. Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act was soon passed—the policy that resulted in the death and displacement of as many as 100,000 members of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations. Apess, a devout Methodist and a descendant of the Pequot people and of white Christians in New England, implored his readers to find common ground in their shared religion, asking in his essay “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833), “Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs?”

Ayers lingers on the great Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, often to moving effect. One of his book’s most remarkable passages describes the moment when Ralph Waldo Emerson received his copy of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Concord, Massachusetts. It was July 4, 1855, and Emerson and his wife, Lidian, had draped their front gate in black bunting to protest the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which had been passed the year before and seemed to make possible the expansion of slavery to the entire West. The volume, with its “raised golden letters sprouting roots and tendrils,” contained what Emerson called “the best piece of American Buddhism that anyone has had strength to write, American to the bone.”

But for Ayers, no literary figure sums up the Union and the specter of its destruction better than Edgar Allan Poe, whom he admires for his “vision of men as vicious brutes, of women as pure and dying, of life as a battle between demons and angels.” Poe’s was a voice, Ayers suggests, that punctured the country’s myths of romance and progress: a reminder that, in a society that often pursued facile or pathetically material forms of happiness, some Americans also understood the darkness of human nature and the essential tragedy in history. Poe’s work is a reminder to readers that history is not clean, or linear, or automatic.

The transitions between the abundant vignettes in American Visions can be abrupt. Enough with literature, you might think—how did James Fenimore Cooper or Herman Melville help James Madison or Henry Clay figure out how to make “balanced” government work? But bringing together a large cacophonous cast seeking an illusive harmony is Ayers’s method of demonstrating that nations are always more than their political institutions and laws, and, hopefully, more than their most lethal divisions. The American nation was a primary subject for each of these writers, each in their own way.

Yet by the end of the 1850s, writes Ayers, America was living with a “broken politics.” “Fantasies of violence…filled imaginations,” “shared patriotism proved impossible to sustain,” and “no one could find the language to imagine a Union that was not divided.” Slavery increasingly tore apart political institutions as well as the social and cultural fabric. American Visions is a wild, sometimes frightful ride to the eve of destruction. The Civil War is out there on the horizon in this book, and its impending arrival is all the more tragic because of the cultural riches we have witnessed on the road to that horror.

Slotkin is a cultural historian and emeritus professor of English at Wesleyan, where he cofounded the American studies program in the late 1960s. In a talk several years ago, he described the program’s approach as “a revisionist wave that departed from the established form of American studies, which tended to celebrate American exceptionalism.” Instead, he said,

we were doing what was not yet called cultural criticism: studying all the manifestations of American culture to understand the ideological fictions through which American nationality had historically been constituted.

For more than fifty years Slotkin has brought this approach to his study of four large concepts that he contends are at the core of our nation’s myths: the frontier, the Founding, the Civil War, and the good war. The myth of the frontier, he writes in A Great Disorder, “uses the history of colonial settlement and westward expansion to explain our national character and our spectacular economic growth.” His three influential books on the subject—Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973), Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (1985), and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)—are the template for anyone examining this country’s mythic self-understanding. More than any other scholar, Slotkin has shaped how we study and how we imagine, generation after new generation, what he calls “the fundamental character of American nationality and the purposes of the American nation-state.” Many academics remain uncomfortable with the very notion of mythic thinking by the public. But they ignore it at their peril, as this new book demonstrates in convincing detail.

The myth of the Founding, Slotkin says, “sanctifies” the story of our national origin in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; with enduring effect we are witnessing this once again on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. A swirling mix of narratives—the myths of the Civil War—make up his third category. The liberation myth focused not only on Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” but also on a “new birth of freedom” for all those emancipated from slavery. The related Unionist myth of “White Reunion” after the war minimized the importance of slavery and rejected Black claims to equality, while the southern myth of the Lost Cause celebrated the virtues of the Old South and its fight to restore the structures of white supremacy.

Slotkin’s myth of the good war tells the story of how a multiracial democracy won World War II. He also identifies several smaller potent myths, like tributaries of larger rivers, by which Americans define their nation and contend for political power. Among them is the myth of the movement (including the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and even the election of Barack Obama and its aftermath). Slotkin spends fully half of A Great Disorder explaining how he believes these overlapping myths have shaped our current crisis of severe polarization and increasing authoritarianism.

In Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes argued that myths are clusters of values and stories that have lost “the memory that they once were made.” Robert Penn Warren, the American poet, novelist, and historian, hated absolutes but had a loving respect for tragedy, perhaps the most useful means by which to understand the power of myth. “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory,” he wrote in his long poem Brother to Dragons (1953), “for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” This is a process sometimes conscious but often not, and we are all in its grip.

Few modern scholars have grasped these elements quite like Slotkin, for whom “myths are the stories—true, untrue, half-true—that effectively evoke the sense of nationality and provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.” His consciously epic journey through the stages of American mythmaking is rich in detail, but it also demands a certain depth of historical memory on the part of readers following along as one stage fades into the next. His most basic assumption is that humans “think mythologically, not rationally.” Our habits of thought, our views of the world, even our actions stem from the stories—the big myths—we carry around in our heads. They are the stuff of politics, of family lore, of schooling, and of sometimes warring historical memories. We make and remake myths as we inhale them from our cultural lives; the more we are educated the more we may think we live critically above them, even as we reinforce them. And it is often politics that brings them, uninvited, to our dinner tables.

Slotkin does some of his best writing about the Civil War myths, especially the long durability of the Confederate Lost Cause and its myriad, sometimes lethal remnants today in disputes over Confederate flags or monuments, as well as the use of its symbols and arguments in the insurrection on January 6, 2021. But his most passionate subject is the myth of the good war—especially the contribution of Hollywood and “platoon movies,” from Bataan (1943) and Fixed Bayonets (1951) to The Dirty Dozen (1965), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Black Hawk Down (2002)—in shaping attitudes across generations. He argues that Hollywood visionaries tried to create the idea of a multicultural nation regenerated by the violence of war, by “linking the embrace of ethnic and racial diversity to the transformation of America’s role as a world-liberating Great Power.” One has to wonder, though, whether Hollywood has been anywhere near as powerful as numerous other forces in our recent history—not least the civil rights movement, the imperatives of the cold war, various periods of economic strife, and the rise of an extremely well-funded conservative movement opposed to so many changes wrought by the 1960s. Movies are a potent cultural force, but so is the Heritage Foundation, with its blueprints for an authoritarian America.

The intriguing test embedded in Slotkin’s project is to try to discern just how much myth explains or reflects our culture. How do we really know when we—or our political enemies—are engaging in what he calls “a creative leap of mythological thinking”? When are myths sources of comfort, and when are they dangerous?

Slotkin’s big myths are undeniable as markers of time, memory, and ideas about the nation. But his claim that the New Deal never became “the theme of a distinct national myth” is puzzling. The “liberal agenda” of Franklin Roosevelt and the host of changes his reforms brought to government’s relationship to its citizens might seem to qualify it for a place in the pantheon. For my parents’ and grandparents’ generations the Depression and the New Deal, along with World War II, influenced their every assumption about life, patriotism, and the social contract. Slotkin contends that it lacked a “single story,” a simplified narrative with lasting power, and was therefore subsumed into the good war myth. Yet it was Lyndon Johnson’s myth of choice, as it was for Joe Biden. Republicans are targeting it with every attack they make on the federal regulatory state, on unions, on public education, and on federal agencies that foster research and new knowledge. The goal is to explode a defining myth of post–World War II America—that the United States, by soft power, could help create a more educated and democratic world. If they succeed, the deep myths at the core of the American experiment may die a rather rapid death, never quite imagined before 2016.

Slotkin’s ultimate aim is to explain the mythological thinking behind the political lethality of Trumpism. He offers a good political history from the 1960s onward to show that the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party results from much more than authoritarian instincts that have consolidated under Trump. The “complex of resentments” and racism that has flourished in today’s culture wars emerged in Ronald Reagan’s campaign against the legacies of the civil rights movement and the New Deal. Slotkin uses the Lost Cause myth a little loosely in characterizing how Patrick Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh pushed Republicans even further into extremism, but he is right that Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, after January 6 and his ongoing legal trials, became a full-blown Lost Cause itself.⁴

A chapter entitled “The Last President of the Confederacy” provides a deep history of that insurrection and a cautionary tale about more than Trump’s obvious legal and moral responsibility for it. Slotkin demonstrates how adept the American right has become, despite its leader’s ignorance of history, in employing the malleable myths of the frontier, the Founding, and the Lost Cause. But unlike the Confederate Lost Cause, Trumpism has managed to fully regain national power and is now taking no prisoners in its effort to make Americans fear or detest democracy itself.

Slotkin asks whether a “blue coalition” born of pluralism, faith in the rule of law, and secular liberalism—and steeped in the myth of the movement—can forge a strong enough countermythology, a “compelling story” of America to ensure that Trumpism is temporary rather than permanent. Are liberals and their representatives in the political, journalistic, and academic classes equipped to fight to convince the public of the value of their pluralistic vision of our history? We will need a bigger, better story about this cacophonous nation, one that can be shared widely across class, regional, and political divides, to avoid the national ruin that may lie ahead.