Don Wildman

And then you find it so useful in the storytelling of Hollywood and in books and so forth, you know, how these these ideas of manhood ought to be reframed with every generation.

The idea of America, you know, in the Vietnam age was so much in question in the 70s.

Suddenly you're seeing Clint Eastwood all over the place, you know, coming into towns and straightening things out.

The West has always been that canvas upon which to, you know, cast, you know, paint the picture of America as we would idealize it, as we wish it was.

The story really can be summed up in, on our end, really where the violence, the idea of the violence comes from.

And it really wasn't from those lone gunmen.

It wasn't from the Native Americans.

It was really about the coordinated expansion of the U.S.

government and private enterprise working together to claim land, extract those resources, suppress resistance.

But that's a story that's very hard to romanticize.

So instead, we turn that all on its head and make characters and archetypes out of all of that.

It's going to be hard to make the frontier of space ever seem as romantic as the frontier of history.

I think I'm going to replace it by True Grit with Jeff Bridges.

I love that depiction because of the ordinariness of life in their epic journey.

You get this sort of grit and boredom of that lifestyle that was really so much of the world that they were living in.

Tori C. Olson is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

He is the author of, most recently, a book we discussed at length here, Red Dead's History, A Video Game, An Obsession, and America's Violent Past.

Read that book side by side by playing the game.

It looks like a lot of fun.

What's on the New Horizons, Tori?