Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 Book

Why a thing is the way it is is never an easy question to answer, or formulate for that matter.
Why is American culture so violence-prone, trigger-happy, or quick-to-strafe? There are likely many reasons. Slotkin settles on one of the easier methods, even if it isn't so secure: culture.
Now, it'd be easy to say that popular culture and especially, literature, which is what Slotkin focuses on here is a kind of elitist, not popular, trend that can't really inform the way people think, can it?
Well, you'd be wrong. Two words: Inter. Net.
Before the days where hearsay and unreason dominated our digital diatribes, people got their scurrilous misrepresentations from other mediums, largely the elite- and often religious-dominated world of literature. How the medium was used to forge the idea of the "heroic" American is Slotkin's focus. He digs into changing views of the American frontier, starting with those startling assholes, the Puritans, who fled England to be free to practice their own fundamentalist, Taliban-like version of Christianity (and in whose honor we endure annual feasts). Nature, Indians, frontiersmen, they're all discussed here to a near-suffocating level of detail, the volume's only drawback. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and how perspectives shifted on what it meant to be an American, or a pioneer, or an outright cold-blooded Indian killer did much to secure in the American conscious the need for an utter lack of conscience and scruple. God wants us to do all this, right?
Things haven't changed much, I guess.