I'm Christopher Leighton and this is open source. The key battle taking place in

this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads according to the

master historian Richard Slotkin. He's here to tell us all

that we're in a 40-year culture war and an identity crisis by now. It's all about drawing on legendary figures like

Daniel Boone and Frederick Douglas, Betsy Ross and Rosa Parks, Robert E. Lee and G.I. Joe, for a sort of composite self-portrait of the country.

You say Richard Larkin, we're in a contest of origin stories in search of a common national myth as you put it.

This book of yours is taken me by storm, a great disorder, you titled it, subtitle National Myth and the Battle for America.

It is the Trump-Biden fight, of course, but with centuries of history bubbling under it.

Walk us around this battlefield, please,

where Maga comes alive, in your telling.

It is not just a Trump slogan on a red cap.

I guess I have to start by saying that one of the things that my book tried to do is to trace

the origin of the culture war, to define a culture war by the way in which the two sides

use national mythology.

National myth is one of the basic structures

that holds a nation state together.

You're born to your family,

you're born to your neighborhood, your community.

You have to learn to think of yourself as a national,

as someone who belongs to America.

And the way that nation states have done that from their origin is to invent a national myth history, a version of their origins that give people

the sense when they identify with it that they belong to a community that is

...