American History through Hollywood Film

Introduction 1. The American Revolution 2. Slavery 3. Abraham Lincoln 4. The Civil War 5. The War's Legacy: the Lost Cause and the Ku Klux Klan 6. 'The Good Indian': Dances With Wolves 7. The Golden Door: Hester Street and The Godfather Part II 8. The Limits of Hollywood History: The Grapes of Wrath and the Great Depression 9. HUAC and Hollywood: The Way We Were and Guilty by Suspicion 10. Remembering the 1960s: Mississippi Burning and JFK BibliographyIndex

Melvyn Stokes is Professor of Film History, and Director of the AHRC-funded 'Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s' research project at University College London, UK. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, a Fulbright Exchange Professor at Mount Holyoke College and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris He has written and edited twelve books, including D.W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation': A History of 'the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time' (2007). He is currently President of SERCIA, the European film organisation.

In American History Through Hollywood Film, Melvyn Stokes offers an impressive overview of filmmakers and audiences' fascination with pivotal periods in the nation's past. With his intelligent analysis and well balanced synthesis of a range of films and historical issues, Stokes has made a significant contribution to the historiography of film and history... The book will be an invaluable resource for students and teachers in a rapidly growing field. -- J. E. Smyth, Associate Professor of History, University of Warwick, UK 20130805 American History through Hollywood Film is the most readable and wide-ranging book ever published about how movies write US history, and how they reflect the preoccupations of their own time. From the American Revolution to the present, Professor Stokes is nimble and wise in his choice of subjects and themes, his gifts as a storyteller and historian coming together to explain why some films are successful at the box office, endure in the public imagination, or disappear from popular memory. He is never less than fascinating when he analyzes the often strange alchemy between fact and fiction that occurs when historical films are made, paying close attention to the constraints on their production, the imperatives driving their ideology, and the vicissitudes of their reception. -- Robert Lang, Professor of Cinema, University of Hartford, USA 20130805 American History Through Hollywood Film offers an impressively detailed overview of a lively field of study. Its ten chapters consider the historical periods, events and figures that have captivated filmmakers and audiences from the silent period to recent blockbusters. Each chapter provides a clear and concise commentary on issues of historiography, historical accuracy and interpretation, as well as case studies considering how, when and why key films were made. With topics ranging from the American Revolution to the civil rights movement, and case studies stretching from The Birth of a Nation