Throughout his storied career, Richard Slotkin has worked tirelessly to pierce America’s fictions with facts. His new work chronicles the creation of our central myths and shows quite clearly how they have been mobilized by both sides of the contemporary culture wars. A Great Disorder is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the past, present, and future possibilities of American democracy.

Here we see a master at work: Richard Slotkin takes five foundational myths—the stories that bind together the American experience—and explores how each one has shaped our shared history and infuses the present. A provocative culmination of Slotkin’s field-defining arguments on the place of violence in creating America, this book is a kind of decoder ring for understanding the ideologies, politics, and cultural productions of the current moment.

Richard Slotkin has shown, in three celebrated books, how the myths of the frontier have shaped American history, culture, politics, and institutions. Now, he reveals how America’s foundational myths have profoundly shaped its culture wars since the late 1990s. This book is a masterpiece, a fitting capstone to an extraordinary career. It should be required reading for all Americans, for it will change our understanding of the United States today.

A supple and dazzling paean to the democracy our mythology once inspired, then impeded, and now fatally distorts. It affirms W. E. B. Du Bois’s truth of truths: ‘the contested meanings of the color-line have been fundamental to the shaping of American nationality, politics—and mythology.’