Featuring a deep dive with 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (among many other books). We will also be joined by scholar and activist Aviva Chomsky, (author of Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths about Immigration).

As the 2020 Election draws near, how do we understand the nature of Trumpism and its relationship to what has come before?

How do we grasp the rise of Trump’s Border Wall and the way it is re-shaping US political imagination?

How has U.S. American history from the beginning been shaped by the way that the edges of the country have been imagined and constructed–often through racism and violence?

How does grappling with the long and bloody American history of the “frontier” and the border change the way we see the present politics and future possibilities for the USA in the 21st century?

How does studying the history of the border help us to see that ways that US “domestic” & “foreign” policy are deeply related?

What will the “end” of the long-standing myth of perpetual American economic and geographic expansion mean for contemporary politics?

What can be done to refuse a future defined by rising border walls and to instead reimagine global human liberation in this era of crisis?

 In this episode, Laura interviews author and Yale historian Greg Grandin about his new book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. They explore how America's foundational myth of progress has given way to protectionism. Will opposition to the wall finally force us to reckon with the white supremacist conquest the frontier myth has always but thinly veiled? And what can we do to replace destructive myths with productive truths? Music in the Middle: “Gold Action” by Life On Planets, courtesy of Lamb and Wolf Records.

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On episode 054 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin. They discuss the notion of American exceptionalism, its foundations in the oppression of black and indigenous communities over centuries, and how it manifests today in relation to the pandemic.

Greg Grandin is Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including most recently The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, and The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes in American History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in the UK. He is also the author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first book, The Blood of Guatemala, won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America, in any discipline. He has published widely in, among other places, The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Hispanic American Historical Review, and The American Historical Review. A graduate of Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, Professor Grandin received his doctorate at Yale University, where he studied under Emilia Viotti da Costa. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Bertolt Brecht | "Everything Changes"
Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your final breath.
But what has happened has happened. And the water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again, but
Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your final breath.

This time we've got historian Greg Grandin on to talk about his new book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, about the history of the American frontier, how it has functioned politically over the years, and how Trump is drawing on that legacy today. (Also listen for an interlude about whether it was appropriate for Bernie Sanders to oppose Reagan's death squad policy in Central America.)

American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, this expansionist project has finally lost its ideological and material vitality, no longer able to neatly reconcile centuries of mounting contradictions. And so politics returned to the border as American expansion hit a wall—figuratively and, as Trump has demanded, very literally. "Trumpism," Grandin writes, "is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no 'divine, messianic' crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger."

Thanks to University of California Press. Check out No Go WorldL How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics by Ruben Andersson ucpress.edu/book/9780520294608/no-go-world

And thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com

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