A little too much inference made for my taste. The author is able to show where about 60-70% of her claims are supported by primary materials, but other times it appears she is applying too many inferences to the thoughts and feelings of those she discusses. I think, overall, the arguments of historical misremembering are valid but there are too many instances of a historical character "feeling/thinking" x, y, or z when those claims aren't explicitly supported by evidence.

Highly recommend. A timely popular examination of memory and landscape in which four sites of American history are investigated to show how the past has been constructed and instrumentalized to promote American capitalist imperialism. Specifically, the author traces how in the pursuit of profit white settlers appropriated, selectively remembered, and reinterpreted the indigenous past to justify the removal of native Americans from their land and the extraction of valuable resources from the land. But these settler-narratives and narratives of racial capitalism, in which a myth of a lost white race loomed large, the author shows, did not die with the closing of the frontier. Long after the West was tamed, the notion of a mythic white race remained central to white supremacist conspiracy theory and “often appears in mainstream cable television shows whose audiences would rather speculate about extraterrestrials and Vikings than accept the Indigenous origins of the country’s ancient monuments. Even more concerning is how contemporary American culture continues to produce variations on this early myth to “justify the ever-deepening exploitation of land and people, against all rational evidence that this is a path of death.” The author hopes that by exposing the “hard histories” behind the myth that the topographies of domination that were built upon these myths can be shattered.

But as the author also recognizes, truth-telling in this country is often met with anger. When in 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee and rename the park where the statue was located, white nationalists responded by holding a march in which some chanted Nazi slogans. The violence reached its peak when James Alex Field rammed his car into a crowd of counter protesters. Those who continue to object to the removal of such monuments recast the Civil War as a contest over states’ rights rather than the institution of slavery. Moreover, they perceive the removal of such monuments as an existential threat to their way of life. The zero-sum logic that informs such thinking has its roots in the settler-colonial and racial capitalism narratives detailed by the author. Yet, the likelihood that one book can overcome the power structures reinforced by this narrative is slim. Still the current situation—an out-of-control pandemic, catastrophic weather events, a politically polarized populace, and a teetering economy—accentuate the timeliness of the author’s message. For until we come to terms with the myths that inform American capitalist ideologies, the siege mentality that galvanized voters in 2016, blocked efforts at developing sustainability solutions to climate change, and fueled conspiratorial fantasies will continue to flourish with dangerous results.