Very comprehensive and the Moby dick argument at the end to tie it all together is a masterpiece of scholarly writing. Amazing.

One of the most important works of scholarship I’ve ever encountered. A jaw dropping feat of research and vision that illuminates the foundational myths of this country from a forgotten period that continues to affect modern thought.

Regeneration Through Violence is an in-depth study of the ways in which the literature of the American frontier created and supported mythologies arisig out of the westward movement from the earliest colonies till the 1850s. His study traces the significant ways American myth has changed as popular responses to the frontier have changed. The earliest Puritan settlers saw the wilderness before them as a vision of hell populated by demonic Indians and transmitted their message by way of the sermon. As settlements moved west the constant contact with Indians and frequent confrontation were responsible for many settlers, especially women and children, being carried into captivity. The literature resulting from this was the popular captivity narratives and their emphasis on the return of those carried off and their hope of redemption. After the Revolution came deeper penetration into the wilderness and the advent of the hunter myth such as stories we associate with Daniel Boone and Cooper's Leatherstocking characters in which the attitudes of settlers favored being more like the Indian and adopting his belief that by using the fundamental resources of the wilderness--trees for building and animals for food--one is renewing the self. Slotkin completes this study, the 1st of 3 volumes, with analyses of how Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick are examples of the extension of the hunter mythology. Through it all the wilderness is seen as the symbol of the primal states of nature and of human consciousness. But always, Slotkin explains, our relationship with the Indians is the identifying characteristic of American history. Settler and Indian coexistence evolved from the Puritan fear of them as hellish demons to a wary alliance with them during the period of the captivity narratives to eventually arrive at the idealized heroes like Boone and Deerslayer who strive to reap the newly-realized rewards from the wilderness, those of self-renewal or self-creation through the violence of the hunt. So the mythology of the frontier moves from Puritan attempts to save the Indians to personal redemption to a regeneration of the wilderness by its destruction. He concludes this volume by showing how America has used these myths throughout its history and in the shaping of a national character, even to how it contributed to attitudes about the Vietnam War, just ended when this volume was published. This is brilliant grand interpretive history and criticism.

Slotkin is a really careful historian and does a fantastic job presenting and interpreting patterns in the primary sources. My favorite chapter was his presentation of how captivity narratives evolved as a genre to absolve Puritans of both their symbolic violence towards their English heritage and their actual violence towards natives. His prose is often pretty dry and the pace felt slow to me as I read this book. Whatever the shortcomings of the words on the page, his overall concept remains really pertinent even today, a time when we delude ourselves into thinking that we're a secular nation that put some mileage between ourselves and the influence of myth.

Lonely Hunters Without Hearts?

Which is prior? An idea or a social reality, and how can the one be used to account for the other? Personally, whenever I read works on cultural history, I often wonder how scholars can allow themselves to be led up Hegelian or even more labyrinthine French post-modernist garden paths in that they fail to see the interaction of mind and matter and, in reaction to Marx’s dictum of men’s social being determining their consciousness, rather simply have it the other way around.

Richard Slotkin’s highly impressive study Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier: 1600 – 1860 is an honourable exception to this one-sidedness in cultural history in that Slotkin not only insists on man being a myth-making animal and the power of myths to shape social reality, but also shows how the reality in which men see themselves contributes to these mythopoetic processes. It was this link between the myth and its breeding-grounds that made Regeneration Through Violence, despite some odd mumbo-jumbo passages, e.g. in connection with Thoreau, such a rewarding experience for me.

Slotkin starts with the assumption that a society that does not know the essence of its own myths and their social functions is doomed to re-living its history and to making the same mistakes all over again. Slotkin sees, at the core of American culture, the concept of finding personal and social regeneration in an act of destroying what one has set out to redeem or to improve. He begins his analysis with a close look at Puritan society and its members’ claim to having been elected by God through a process of serious self-probing and -exploration. In their desire to hold their ground against their European contemporaries, who often regarded them as living too close to the Indians, who were seen as “savages”, the Puritans went to great lengths to distance themselves from the wilderness without – i.e. the unexplored land and its autochthonous inhabitants – as well as from the wilderness within – i.e. the desire to explore what lay beyond the Puritan community. One of the means of doing so were the captivity narratives, which featured individuals that had to face the temptation of throwing off the confines of civilization and of becoming “Indian” and that overcame these temptations with the help of their belief in God and of being proponents of civilization. As time went by, even the Puritans had to renege on their policy of self-isolation and to undertake forays into the wilderness in order to preserve their communities. One of the new ideals was the Indian fighter, who adopted the ways of the Indian in order to be able to defeat him. Nevertheless, learning from the Indians imbued more and more of these Indian fighters with a sense of sympathy for the natives – a development that endangered the Puritans’ concept of themselves –, whereas simultaneously the need for hero figures arose, and one of the results of these developments was the genesis of the hunter myth.

Indian tribes like the Delaware relied on the hunter myth as the core of their creation myth: According to their legends, their forefathers lived beneath a lake, and one day a hunter followed a hind on her way to the surface, where he finally hunted her down and killed her. After he had eaten of her flesh, he realized the bounty of Nature and the gods and made his people follow him from their subterranean dwelling-places to the surface. The hunter myth became an important motif in Western literature, e.g. in the Daniel Boone myth, but since the white men did not share the complex traditions of the Indians, they lacked the sense of self-confinement – e.g. the limitation to hunting and killing for the sake of preserving themselves –, and the experience of the hunt became, for them, a means of proving their prowess and their ability to improve and therefore to take over the land. At this point, it might be best to quote from Slotkin himself:

”Believing in the myth of regeneration through the violence of the hunt, the American hunters eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom, their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished. We have, I think, continued to associate democracy and progress with perpetual social mobility (both horizontal and vertical) and with the continual expansion of our power into new fields or new levels of exploitation. Under the aspect of this myth, our economic, social, and spiritual life is taken to be a series of initiations, of stages in a movement outward and upward toward some transcendent goal. We have traditionally associated this form of aspiring initiation with the self-transcendence achieved by hunters through acts of predation. The forces of the environment and the hidden or dark sources of our personal and collective past – factors which limit our power to aspire and transcend – become the things which, as hunters, we triumph over, control, and transcend. They become, under the aspect of the myth, enemies and opponents, who captivate and victimize us and against whom we must be revenged.” (p.557)

This fateful version of the hunter myth, which is at the bottom of what is commonly called frontier spirit, can even be used to justify American expansion and American participation in overseas conflicts, and Slotkin darkly presages:

”But the cycle of the myth never really ends. The animal skins on the wall, the tree stumps in the yard, the scalp bounty money in the bank, and the pervasive smell of burning are proofs of what we have been; and they suggest that we still will play, in concept or action, the same role in dialectical opposition to a new Indian, a new social or political antithesis. As the captivities of Mary Rowlandson and Mercy Short suggest, rescue from dark events is never complete. Physical combat with and captivity to the dark forces (whether they are really dark or only imagined to be so) infects the mind itself with darkness. The hunters and the redeemed captives return from the forest to find the people still only restively pacified, still mourning the passing of a Golden Age of complacency, still anticipating new captivities and rescues. The struggle turns inward: Indians are discovered lurking in subversive forces within society itself, in the independence and aspiration of one’s own children, in the recesses of one’s own mind. A new captivity, a new hunt, and a new ceremony of exorcism repeat the myth-scenario on progressively deeper, more internal levels. Wars are followed by witch-hunts. Moby Dick is a creature of external reality and an aspect of the hunters’ minds. It has been said that ‘men make a waste land and call it peace’; and the desert is not simply that of a savaged landscape but of a tortured mind.” (p.564)

What may sound like a rather simplified and biased indictment of American capitalism and expansion, of bigoted conformity born out of a desire to fend off and maybe sublimate the urges of libido and the subconscious, which are generally associated with “Indians, is more complex and more convincing because Slotkin thoroughly shows how the hunter myth and the Puritan heritage interacted and how the myth developed and renewed itself in American literature – in both its more popular (e.g. the Boone myth, the popular image of Davy Crockett, the Leatherstocking tales) and its more artistic (e.g. Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville’s Moby-Dick, which is regarded as the American national myth) forms. Slotkin also distinguishes between the literatures of New England, of the North-West, of Pennsylvania and the middle states and the southern states, and he shows that the hunter myth was not the same everywhere. What makes his study extremely convincing is the attention he pays to the interplay between the myths and their shaping in literature on the one hand and the social realities that existed in a particular region at a given point in time. He even shows how abolitionist literature such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin is influenced by the basic American myths, and he provides convincing insight into the different roles the European settlers ascribed to the Indians. Familiarity with the major works that are being discussed, with American history and concepts such as Jacksonian vs. Jeffersonian democracy might be extremely helpful to the reader, and sometimes he will probably have difficulty in seeing the forest for the trees as Slotkin’s approach is not afraid of amassing a lot of detail, which will often be taken for granted in later passages of the book.

Regeneration Through Violence is therefore not a book that is easily read but nevertheless it is an inspiring and exciting intellectual enterprise, which will help you better understand not only American mentality but also latest global developments.

A literature review of sorts on how white Americans' experiences and conceptions of the frontier and Indian nations contributed toward a sense of national identity and purpose. In particular, Slotkin focuses on the ways that the viewpoints of the frontier and the characters that inhabit it changed based on the passage of time or differences in geography. A very tough book to get through if you're not a fan of in-depth analysis of captivity narratives and fictional/biographical narratives of so-called frontier heroes such as Daniel Boone. The most in-depth look into this particularly important subject on the changing American psyche.

This is a great big humdinger of a book, and the first of three laying out Slotkin’s thesis on the roots and branches of American culture in violent frontier myth. Historiographically, it lays at a transition point in American Studies. The original American Studies scholars explicitly founded it as a Cold War enterprise, a way to foster their vision of America —more or less, that of Cold War liberalism — back when people still thought culture was a big Cold War weapon and that Jackson Pollock was worth CIA money. Slotkin turns away from their vision of America as the culmination of western humanism but still uses a lot of the old American Studies concepts and tropes. These include canonization — Slotkin both crams old AS favorites like Melville and Hawthorne into his thesis and tries to canonize new ones, like frontier writer Nathan Filson — and an attachment to the concept of myth as an explanatory category. Analyzing the frontier as myth goes a long way in American Studies. It’s poignant, in a way- the American Studies cadre included many of the first generation of American Jews given equal footing in American schools, and in general it was more nerdy New Yorkers and immigrant’s kids — names like Slotkin and DeVoto — defining this picture of America and the frontier than it was sons of the pioneers.

Like the American Studies guys (and like me in some areas), Slotkin is an arch-lumper in this book. American culture as a whole, he argues, is defined by a series of tropes descended from the English encounter with the wilderness. Because some of the first English to do it (and especially to write about it) were Puritans, one major strand of processing that encounter entails seeing the wilderness as a place of evil, a place where good Christians go to become bad and die, a reflection of the dark spaces of the mind and soul. One of the ways the Puritans processed this was through captivity narratives, where a Puritan is captured by Indians, lives with them for a while, and then escapes or is bought back into the fold, chastened and stronger in faith.

But as the frontier expanded and white people got more used to it, the idea of the wilderness as a place of fulfillment got bigger, but with caveats. American litterateurs struggled mightily with how to cope with the identification between the wilderness and the Native Americans (so too, for that matter, does Slotkin, who lumps them all together into one culture more or less at one with nature, etc etc). The whites wanted to master the wilderness the same way they thought the Native Americans had, but it was important that they maintain their special white, Christian status. As mythic figures like Daniel Boone became national (and international) favorites, the frontier became, in narrative anyway, a place for whites to prove their mettle by entering into the wilderness. They could learn from the natives and even befriend them, but would eventually master them at their own wilderness abilities, initiating themselves into the mysteries of the hunter and the warrior. This would lead to the ushering in of white civilization, where the frontiersman would either need to assimilate or move on, the sort of prepackaged tragedy narrative from which Anglo culture gotten so much mileage.

There’s a lot of interesting material in this book, overstuffed in that classic AS way with block quotes, stories about publishing, etc. There are fascinating characters like Gilbert Imlay, a Kentuckian conman and lover of Mary Wollstonecraft who sold an enlightenment-tinged vision of frontier democracy to get radical French and British to sponsor a western breakaway state before fleeing a pregnant Wollstonecraft with the money. There’s also some interesting stuff where European and northeastern writers wanted to depict the whole thing as capital R Romance, which culminated with James Fenimore Cooper’s lachrymose and intricately symbolic tales of the noble savage white guy who was more native than the natives but also white and what a dilemma! But western writers — and most audiences — wanted more realism, i.e. shootings and scalps.

The basic thrust of the analysis seems sound, especially when it leaves the Jungian myth stuff to one side and hews to the material. One thing that encouraged an American monomyth more than anything unconscious was a monolithic capitalist publishing industry centered in New York, that had to try to sell books the whole country would buy. The frontier story appealed to all sections, even as Slotkin details how the different sections interpreted Boone and other figures according to their peculiar lights. My understanding is that American Studies turned more towards questions of creating a national consciousness — and even more to questions of race, which Slotkin does not interrogate enough — after this transition point in the 1970s. It’ll be interesting to see if Slotkin’s later books, bringing the story of frontier myth to the twentieth century, handles that. ****’

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860 by Richard Slotkin

Every nation, to be a nation, must have a national mythology. A nation is not an organic entity but a vast narrative structure inhabited by its people. A nation is a literary creation, a living story which provides its inhabitants with a sense of who they are and what unites them. The national mythology is at once creature and creator; at once a product of the collective imagination and the cultural wellspring from which the literary imagination draws its strength. The more compelling and universal the mythology, the more power it exerts over the cultural consciousness of its adherents.

The national mythology of America is that of the frontier, and of those who conquer it. The west has always captured the European imagination. It is the land of darkness, of the setting sun, of the unconscious, of death and rebirth, of dream and fantasy. To travel beyond the western horizon is to travel to the underworld, to be confronted with the darkness within oneself, either to overcome it or to be lost in it forever.

Founding meager, vulnerable outposts on the coast of a vast continent devoid of white, Christian men, the early American colonists brought with them their deep-seated fears about the wilderness and its temptations. For the Puritans of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay—strict and austere reformed protestants seeking to establish a society based on what they believed were Biblical principles—the dark and brooding wilderness was the outward manifestation of man’s helplessness before the overwhelming power of evil in a fallen world, as well as his own depravity as a captive of sin.

The Indians they encountered—Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, Nipmuck—attracted and repulsed them simultaneously. The Indians were primitive in both the positive and negative aspects. Viewed on the one hand as guileless and impressionable, the Puritans hoped they would make faithful Christian converts and adopt civilized ways; while on the other hand, their savage animality and ignorance of the Gospel made them willing vessels of the satanic powers of the earth; tools of the Devil (or the Devil’s mortal agents, French Jesuits) for the persecution and destruction of God’s elected people.

Fear of the wilderness, and of the Indian as its human embodiment, provoked mistrust and irreconcilable cultural tension between the colonists and the Indians. The Puritan authorities feared the Indian because they feared becoming the Indian; losing their closely-guarded sense of community and moral order and being swallowed up by the primal landscape.

Tensions with the Indians exploded into Indian Wars, and it was during the largest Indian war in New England’s history that an entirely new literary tradition began to develop; one that would draw inspiration from real experiences of the frontier and its people instead of being merely a projection of cultural elites from Europe and the American coast.

For Puritan elites like Increase Mather, King Philip’s War was a great spiritual trial; at once a punishment for a collective straying from Biblical orthodoxy and a testing ground through which God would once again reveal his grace at work in the world and establish a new covenant with his people. The most prominent work of Puritan literature to emerge from the war was the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson.

Rowlandson was captured by Narragansetts during the war, but her real captivity was metaphorized as the captivity of feminine Christian virtue by the heathenry of the forest. The main character of Rowlandson’s narrative is not Rowlandson herself, but the grace of God revealing itself through her Christian chastity and her helpless submission to His will.

Edited and introduced by Increase Mather, Rowlandson’s account demonstrated the role of the frontier in Puritan orthodoxy. For the intellectual of the east coast, the frontier had a providential role, but only insofar as it provoked pious inner contemplation, and only so long as one came away from one’s experience of it having learned Christian lessons.

Benjamin Church’s account was different. Church was not a scholar or a theologian, but a frontiersman and a soldier who sought to survive in Indian country by adapting to the Indian ways of hunting and warfare. Unlike his compatriots in Boston, Church did not see imitation of the Indian as something to be feared and guarded against, but rather as something to be sought. In the midst of King Philip’s War, he decided that the only way to defeat the Indians was to adopt their tactics; to see the war, and the natural landscape, the way the Indians saw it; to become the Indians and beat them at their own game.

God was not the protagonist of Church’s account, but rather Church himself. By learning the ways of the frontier—by communing with the hated wilderness—Church absorbed its power. He hunted King Philip the way an Indian would hunt a deer in the New England woods (and, as Slotkin points out, the way Captain Ahab would hunt the white whale in Moby Dick).

When his party killed Philip and captured his family (who were later sold into slavery in the West Indies), Church depicted himself taking possession of the Sachem’s royal regalia. In victory, Church was not an ambassador of civilization re-imposing order over chaos. In hunting down and killing Philip, he was not suppressing a rebellion of savage people. Instead, he was deposing and usurping Philip as King of the Woods and Lord of the Hunt. In destroying the Indian, he was becoming more Indian than the Indian.

While the elites of the coast were looking on the frontier and its people with fear and derision, it was casting a spell over the ever-increasing number of people who were making a livelihood in it. Church’s raw, impious, experiential account of frontier warfare became the first staple of a literary tradition that would both define and be defined by a new and wholly original emerging American culture: the culture of the frontier.

Slotkin traces the development of this tradition from Church’s account to that of Robert Rogers during the French and Indian War, and, finally, to its efflorescence in what became the preeminent mythology of American nationhood: the legend of Daniel Boone.

John Filson wrote the first biography of Daniel Boone as an appendix to what was essentially an advertising pamphlet encouraging the settlement of Kentucky. In Filson’s hands, Boone, though uneducated, was portrayed as a natural-born philosopher, opining about the natural condition of man and his discovery of his own character as he conquered the wilderness and made a life for himself and his family.



Starting with Filson’s narrative, Daniel Boone became what can only be adequately described as something of an American demigod. By turns a western hunter, a Puritan captive, a Southern naturalist-surveyor and aristocrat, and a good-hearted Quaker, the Boone legend was adapted and expanded upon by each of America’s major regional cultures, making Boone a national symbol of America’s encounter with itself on the frontier. The Boone story was endlessly adaptable, and it provided a lure for every type of American to travel west and experience their violent consummation with nature.

The wilderness hunter, typified by Boone, became the archetype of America’s western man-on-the-make, the wealth and status-hungry backwoods proletariat, often compared by Europeans and American east coasters alike to the Jacobins of Revolutionary France. In Jacksonian America, the frontier mythology eclipsed the old order of the east, as the backwoods settlers grew in wealth, population, and political clout vis-à-vis their east coast counterparts, and crowned their achievement by electing one of their own to the White House.



From the Jacksonian Era onward, the frontier mythology simply took control of the American imagination. Through the discovery, conquest, and exploitation of the wilderness and its resources, any man could make himself the rival of a European nobleman. American democracy was to be achieved not by bureaucratic institutions or communal redistribution or what we would now call a social safety net, but instead by the creative destruction of the natural environment.

With rifle and hatchet, any man could build himself a kingdom in the wilderness. The promise of American democracy was the promise that the frontier and its resources were limitless; and that as a result, power and prosperity were there for the taking for anyone with the gumption to seize them.

It hardly bears elaboration how this notion has influenced American culture, for good or ill.

I read up to page 320. Lost interest.

The opening part of a three part book series, and what feels like was written initially with this book only in mind, this cultural history by Richard Slotkin takes on the notion of "myth making" in American history and literature. The book was published in the early 1970s, so it predates (and perhaps prefigures) a few seminal post-modernist texts like Lyotard's Postmodernism, so the terminology some times feels a little lacking. What is not lacking is the thoroughness of the reading and the thoroughness of the evidence and argumentation.

Beginning with the earliest writings of the European colonizers writing in English, Slotkin moves to define his thesis in the early sections. He writes: "The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the 'national character.' Through myth the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected." Thinking of this book as historical argument, one of the important factors moving forward to is to consider that for the most part he's explaining what is. One recurring theme of a lot of American Studies texts is looking for cultural parallels in events and language hundreds of years apart in time. So you might link Ahab with American military leadership in Vietnam, or even more succinctly, the use of the phrase "in country" during Vietnam links historically to the extermination of Native Americans during the "winning of the West". The mythological aspects of this show up in the ways in which early character moments in American identity were linked, caused, or resulted from the literature and writing that occurred alongside.

He continues: "American attitudes toward the idea of a national mythology have been peculiarly ambivalent." There's a contradictory impulse in a lot of American culture between something being brand new, fresh, and exceptional, as well as something hearkening back toward a set of origins that prescribe actions in the contemporary. The ideas of newness and regeneration are often at odds with tradition and history, and not necessarily as competing ideas among rivals, but as competing within the same people, thinking, or texts.

So this book cannot be adequately summed up, but it's an extremely thoughtful and engaging history, and while there is an overall set of ideas, each chapter is a separate text, often long and dense, and very interesting. It's a book that both draws on books you know and gives you books to put on your list. And as someone who has read a lot of the book he investigates, you're also saved from some of the worst dross the country has produced.

I read about half of this for a class in college, where we were looking specifically at Puritan culture and how it interacted with the perceived outside threat of Native American peoples in colonial North America. Really interesting book and something I've been intended to reread in full for at least a decade now. So last year, I pulled it out and made a go of it.

This book is very long and can be rather dry in places (my 4 stars is a downgrade from 5, mostly because some chapters were more of a slog than others). It's also not a straightforward history where you will be provided dates of events for better context. You will need at least a rough understanding of major events from 1600-1860, stuff that most US education does cover but might be worth brushing up on for reference. Slotkin wrote more of a literary history, using primary sources from the period that include: non-fiction firsthand and retold accounts (primarily captivity narratives), sermons and polemics, poetry/verse, and novels/romances. From these Slotkin pulls out the foundational archetypes, narratives, and myths of the American frontier and by extension American culture and a sort of American psyche.

The two main archetypes/myths that Slotkin argues are core to understanding the culture are the twin narratives of captivity and the hunter. The former develops from the Puritans' relation to the wilderness and the natives they associated with the wilderness, though he also provides different attitudes/perspectives (French Catholic missionaries, non-Puritan English looking to stake a claim). Out of the captivity narrative emerges the hunter archetype, a man who has overcome his captivity and begins to identify with the Indian, while maintaining the qualities (in varying shape/degree) of civilized Christian whiteness. As these images cement in the American imagination, questions are raised and the archetypes/narratives become problematized as American identity itself begins to solidify in the mid-19th century. In particular, Slotkin spends some time analyzing Thoreau and Melville's Moby-Dick, both of which he argues reveal a culture where art has reached fruition in understanding and grappling with its foundational myths. (Indeed, Moby-Dick is a book that seriously interrogates The Hunter archetype and fails to really resolve the myriad of questions it asks.)

One interesting thing (to me, anyway) is how Slotkin integrates Jungian psychoanalytic criticism (and Campbell's later mythopoeic approach) without taking an absolutist approach that some critics in this vein tend toward. Jung, rather, provides a useful framework by which to understand how foundational myths development and the collective psyche is formed. He treats the archetypes not as inherent or static but as being shaped in relation to culture clashes and the conditions of the environment Puritans entered. You could argue that this is very "of its time," considering that psychoanalytic criticism was popular in the 1960s, but that disregards the strength of the model and the depth it provides. I'm also really interested in Jung's model, so it's nice to see this approach work.

One reason I read this book now is I have a feeling it might offer a lot of insight on why American culture has been so defined by violence and how this violence continues to reverberate today, given regularity of mass shootings and a resurgence in reactionary politics. I think it does offer some insight, especially given his notes on the hunter archetype within militaristic rhetoric of the Vietnam era, but it's not going to provide clear answers that provide a motive, etc. More like pointing to the images we can't seem to shake from our collective imagination, which might at best help us understand some piece of what's driving the why's and wherefore's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrnIs...