The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race"

The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" by Jason Colavito

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans.

This The Good Book Club meeting was held on October 12, 2025.