This book examines the ways in which symbols of white working-class labor and identity have become signifiers of a more authentic, mythologized American identity rooted in a sense of goodness, exceptionalism, and racial purity as a defense mechanism against social change. The volume traces the escalation of this belief from seemingly innocuous popular things like Bruce Springsteen and lifestyle trucks to white nationalist black metal and The Turner Diaries, with an examination of the long-standing conventions of the pastoral tradition and melodramatic form as ways of seeing and hearing that reinforce the idea that only some American experiences make valid American stories. 

Dr. Matthew Ussia has been teaching literature, composition, and creative writing at Duquesne since 2013. He is currently the Director of First Year Writing. His first book of poetry The Red Glass Cat, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2021. Fred Shaw in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes The Red Glass Cat as beating with "a thumping big heart."  His second book of poetry, Saturday Night on Earth, was published in 2025, also on Alien Buddha Press.  His writings have appeared in Mister Rogers and Philosophy, Winedrunk Sidewalk, Future Humans in Fiction and Film, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and The Open Mic of the Air Podcast among others. He is co-editor of The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the Lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank and Recasting Masculinity. He has presented at NeMLA, NCTE, CTE, ACLA, and the CCCC Mid-Atlantic Summer Conference, among others. Dr. Ussia's areas of specialty include literary theory, pedagogy, North American Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and contemporary global literature. His classes tend to focus upon the intersection between the academy and broader global trends. His scholarship focuses on how globalization, consumerism, and other factors of modernity influence the construction of individual, local, and national identity.