Below you will find a list of sources and readings referenced in each episode of Ending the Myth. Links will be given where possible, but www.z-lib.org is an excellent resource for e-books.

EP 0 – The Frontier Thesis

• In this episode we cover material discussed in Chapter 7 of End of the Myth
• The quote in the intro is from p269-271 in End of the Myth
• The “frontier thesis” comes from Frederick Jackson Tuner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Here is a link to the paper that Turner read before the American Historical Association in 1893 that would eventually be published in Turner’s book of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920).
• On the Dunning School view of history:
  • WEB Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) was written as a refutation of the Dunning School view of history. The final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” remains one of the best critiques of the reactionary movement available.
• On the rise of the Eugenics movement:
  • Journalist Edwin Black has written an extensive and very readable history of the eugenics movement, *War Against the Weak* (2004). Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) remains the best critique of the “science” of the eugenics movement.
• Closing quote
  • The closing quote is from Charles and Mary Beard’s Basic History of the United States (1944), p 362-363. Charles and Mary Beard were leading figures in the school of progressive history that came about at the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on the role of capitalism and class interest in their work, the Beards wrote some of the first histories of America from a left-perspective. Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) remains one of the best works on America’s idiotic Constitution available.

EP 1 – The Road Not Taken

• The intro and the theme of this episode comes from Lerone Bennett Jr’s excellent 1970 article, “The Road Not Taken.” Lerone Bennett was a journalist and historian who, in 1954, wrote an explosive article titled “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren” that brought the story of Sally Hemmings into the popular consciousness. In 1958, Bennett became the executive editor of Ebony, where he served as the politics editor for the magazine into the 1970s.
  • Bennett’s “The Road Not Taken” as it appeared in Ebony in 1970.
  • An expanded version of “The Road Not Taken” from Bennett’s essay collection, The Shaping of Black America (1975)
• The Trial of John Punch
  • The 1640 trial of John Punch is a critical point for the development of slavery in America. An excellent discussion of the case and its ramifications can be found on the now defunct Uncivil Podcast.
• Basing their economy around slavery forced the South to create a cultural/legal/political superstructure for the maintenance of the peculiar institution. For more on the ways that slavery shaped the culture of the South see:
  • John Hope Franklin’s, The Militant South (1956)
• British defense of slavery:
  • In 1745, an unnamed British merchant wrote an influential pamphlet arguing that the British empire should reinvest in the African slave trade and the use of slavery in agriculture. It is noteworthy in that it explicitly points out the economic advantages to be gained through chattel slavery and argues that it is a competitive imperative that the Britain double down on slavery.
• Thomas Jefferson and violence
  • The history of Thomas Jefferson and slavery has not just been forgotten out of a polite respect for one of the founding fathers. It was, in many cases, intentionally ignored in order to write hagiographies of the man. When Lerone Bennett Jr published an article about Sally Hemmings and her family’s claim to be descendants of Jefferson in 1954, it was met with scorn from the popular press (in 1994 it would be proven correct). Similarly, an essay in Smithsonian Magazine in 2012, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” challenged people’s view of the man – receiving scorn from some quarters and half-hearted rebuttals from others. The author, Henry Wiencek, would expand on the article a year later with his book Master of the Mountain.
• Thomas Jefferson and the invention of the dumbwaiter
  • In a 1995 essay critiquing what they dubbed the newly developing “Californian Ideology” in tech, English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron made this interesting analysis of the purpose of such technology as the dumbwaiter:
    • “The Dumb Waiter - As Hegel pointed out, the tragedy of the masters is that they cannot escape from dependence on their slaves. Rich white Californians need their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens. Unable to surrender wealth and power, the white people of California can instead find spiritual solace in their worship of technology. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. Techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave-like labour from inanimate machines. Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain the machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved. At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many ingenious gadgets - including a 'dumb waiter' to mediate contact with his slaves. In the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that this liberal slave-owner is the hero of those who proclaim freedom while denying their brown-skinned fellow citizens those democratic rights said to be inalienable.”
• Role of slavery in the American Revolution:
  • In 2014, historian Gerald Horne published The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Horne sparked immediate controversy by trying to bring the issue of slavery to the fore in the events that led to the American war for independence. An intentionally provocative work, it is an important read.

EP 2 – Expansion and Native Americans

• In this episode we cover material discussed in chapters 1&2 in End of the Myth
• The story of Frederick Stump from the intro is from p21-22 of End of the Myth
• Additional material for this episode was pulled from:
  • David Stannard’s *American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World* (1992)
  • Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (2001)
  • Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1986)
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2015)
• For more on Indian Removal and the case for labeling it a genocide, read Ward Churchill’s essay “‘Nits Make Lice’: The Extermination of North American Indians, 1607-1996”
• Cicero
  • The quote on Cicero is from an excellent talk Michael Parenti gave on his excellent book The Assassination of Julius Caesar.
• For more on the Comanche Empire, see Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire (2009)
• Quote in the outro is from p44-45 of End of the Myth

EP 3 – Andrew Jackson

• In this episode we cover material discussed in chapter 3 of End of the Myth
• Intro Quote is from End of the Myth, p51-52
• Jackson’s early biography pulled from:
  • Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977)
  • James Ely Jr, “Andrew Jackson as Tennessee State Court Judge, 1798-1804,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol 40 No 2 (Summer 1981)
• The British nationalist murals in Ulster that we mentioned:
  • Ulster nationalist points gun at the viewer
  • The “Sons of Ulster”
  • Another mural we didn’t discuss, which was painted by Irish nationalist detailing the relationship between British occupational forces, British nationalists in Ulster, and the Apartheid government of South Africa
  • One of many Irish nationalist murals of Frederick Douglass
• For more on dueling and the comically stupid and violent early 19th century see John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956) or listen to the segments “The Duel” and “The Dishonor Code” from the Backstory with the American History Guys podcast.
• For a look at the political rise of Andrew Jackson, see:
  • Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1992)
• Jackson’s Inauguration
  • “An Inauguration for the People,” Wall Street Journal, 1/20/2009
  • There is also a good segment on Jackson’s inauguration on the “A History of Populism” episode of the excellent podcast BackStory with the American History Guys.
    • They also have a good segment on elite concerns over Andrew Jackson.
• For more on the struggle over Indian removal in Georgia and Jackson’s subsequent policies, see:
  • Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1986)
• For more on Harsha Walia’s writings on Jackson and its connection to the formation of future borders and imperialism, see Border and Rule (2021)
• For more on Marx’s theory of proletarianization:
  • Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I Chapter Twenty-Five Section 3 “Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army” See also:
    • Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote an excellent book The Origin of Capitalism (1999). Wood gives a fantastic overview and historical analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, goes in-depth about the social transformations and dramatic changes in relationships between human beings and nature that had to happen for capitalism to form. Through this history she aptly describes the process of proletarianization, as well as marxist alternatives. (pdf here).
    • David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) Chapter 13: Social Reproduction
    • Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (1967) Pg 8 section 26
    • For a more modern take built on top of Marx’s proletarianization theory, see Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974). Braverman expanded on the proletarianization theory in a new neoliberal context, arguing that many groups of middle-class workers (notably routine clerical employees and skilled artisans) were being effectively proletarianized by having their labour dehumanized or de-skilled.
  • Frantz Fanon’s thoughts on a national bourgeoisie and elite can be found in chapter 3 of Wretched of the Earth (1961), "The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness"
  • Here is a small sample of the huge number of articles comparing Trump and Jackson:
    • “The New Old Hickory,” US News & World Report, 2/13/2017
    • “Trump Cites Andrew Jackson as his Hero – and a Reflection of Himself,” Washington Post, 3/15/2017
    • “Donald Trump Truly is the Heir to the Legacy of Andrew Jackson,” The New Republic, 8/3/2020
    • And, of course, the inevitable flurry of “wELl aKsuAlLy” articles in response:
      • “What Would Andrew Jackson Think of Donald Trump?” CNN, 5/2/2017
      • “Even Andrew Jackson Showed More Leadership than Donald Trump in a Pandemic,” Washington Post, 4/1/2020.
      • “Donald Trump, the Man who Would Not be Jackson,” The Hill, 12/18/2020
• Outro Quote is from End of the Myth, p58

EP 4 – The Safety Valve

• In this episode we cover material discussed in chapter 4 of End of the Myth
• Intro Quote is from End of the Myth, p70-71
• On the writing of the Constitution:
  • Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) remains the best book on the class motives that forged the document
  • Michael Parenti’s essay “A Constitution for the Few” in his book Democracy for the Few is a nice summary of Beard’s argument.
• WEB Du Bois’s discussion of white workers is from Black Reconstruction which you should consider mandatory reading. It is not just one of the greatest histories ever written, it is one of the great pieces of American literature.
  • For a sociology of the Antebellum South, see John Hope Franklin’s, The Militant South (1956)
• The book Brian mentions that looks at 19th century horror literature through a capitalist lens is David McNally’s Monsters of the Market (2011).
  • HG Wells discusses the real fears of “race suicide” brought on by the urban crisis of the late 19th century. From HG Wells The Time Machine (1894): “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear… that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position… Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein… Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor—is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land… And this same widening gulf… will make the exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour… [The workers] would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.”
• Marx’s response to Wakefield’s theory of colonization in Captial Vol 1 can be found here.
• The closing quote is from End of the Myth, p 81-82