Tag: pop culture

Gamers Take on the Civil War

Gamers Take on the Civil War

As historians and teachers, we are often keenly aware of how movies and television influence what students think about the Civil War and about history more broadly. In recent years, historians have weighed in on the virtues and distortions of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, and Steve McQueen’s ...
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The South Rises Yet Again, This Time on HBO

The South Rises Yet Again, This Time on HBO

For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how Americans remember the Civil War, the last few months have been something of a treasure trove. The sectional conflict has surfaced repeatedly, in a variety of ways--some hopeful, some troubling--from confrontations over the removal of Confederate monuments to the ...
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<i>Men Go to Battle</i> and the Civil War's Dark Turn

Men Go to Battle and the Civil War’s Dark Turn

ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannonshot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author’s ideas that they were “concatenated without abruption.”                       ...
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Mercy Street header depicting three characters and a battle scene

Mercy Street’s Season Two Premiere: Radical Medical Procedures, Rebel Spies, ‘That’ Pinkerton, and the Plight of the Contrabands

Season one of PBS’s Civil War hospital drama, Mercy Street, took historical accuracy seriously, often reflecting recent historiography. Even its annoyingly inaccurate storyline involving John Wilkes Booth’s plot to blow up the hospital during a Lincoln visit was loosely based on actual events. The season ended with a cliffhanger involving ...
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The Underground Railroad in Art and History: A Review of Colson Whitehead’s Novel

Colson Whitehead’s eerily brilliant and deceptively simple novel, The Underground Railroad, is much more than a fictional account of historical reality. Like all inspired works of art, the book, even at its most fantastical, deftly unearths the horrible truth at the heart of racial slavery in a manner that very ...
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Matthew McConaughey stars in The Free State of Jones

Right and Wrong in “The Free State of Jones”: Making Sense of the Civil War Film Tradition

No one quite knows what to make of “The Free State of Jones,” the latest big-budget feature film about the history of the Civil War. Some have praised it as the “final word on racism’s vicious legacy” while others have lambasted it for engaging in “the passive violence of distortion.” ...
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At a meeting of the Union League, Moses (Mahershala Ali) and Newt (Matthew McConaughey) tell the Freedman that all citizens shall have the right to vote.

Aiming for Accuracy: Free State of Jones, Contingency, and the Meaning of Freedom

Early in Free State of Jones a Confederate soldier proclaims he is not fighting for slavery but rather “for honor.” His comrades, including poor Mississippi farmer Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), needle him. Considering the "Twenty Negro Law,” Conscription Act, and tax-in-kind law, they point out that their blood only helps ...
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LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte in Roots (1977).

Roots (1977) versus Roots (2016)

I was initially skeptical about the Roots remake (especially because of the History Channel’s involvement) and watched the original again to see if an update seemed warranted. I found that while still riveting, it has many shortcomings. The original mini-series inaccurately depicts West African kingdoms, for example, and glosses over the ...
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Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Civil War Era

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Civil War Era

As scholarship on the Civil War era expands, Hollywood, too, has cast a wider gaze at the conflict and its roots. This year, with movies like “Free State of Jones” and “Birth of a Nation,” filmmakers continue to explore the struggles beyond the battlefield but still central to the war ...
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Philadelphia’s Civil War: New Documentary Depicts Racial Tensions in Wartime City

This post was written by Michael Johnson, a PhD student at George Washington University. The fourteen-part series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” produced by Sam Katz and History Making Productions, traces the development of American ideals, character, and democracy over four centuries of one of the nation’s most crucial cities. Episode ...
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Envying Roots:  The 1970s Mini-Series is Back!

Envying Roots: The 1970s Mini-Series is Back!

In the last several decades, African Americans have become avid genealogists, turning eagerly to Ancestry.com and DNA testing, joining clubs and traveling to the National Archives in an effort to fill in their family trees. Henry Louis Gates credits the original 1977 television series, Roots, for initiating this interest, saying ...
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#TBT: YA Novels Take Teens Back to the Civil War and It. Is. Awesome.

At some point, a stereotypically boring Social Studies teacher probably made you read The Red Badge of Courage, Across Five Aprils, or Rifles for Watie. There’s nothing wrong with these books. They tell compelling stories through teenage eyes that give very accurate accounts of various Civil War experiences. I have ...
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Key and Peele's “Civil War Reenactment”: Historical Sketch Comedy as Social Commentary

Key and Peele’s “Civil War Reenactment”: Historical Sketch Comedy as Social Commentary

Americans are increasingly forgetful of the fact that the Civil War was about slavery. Atlanta's 2010 Sesquicentennial kicked off with a celebration of secession, sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Only a few days ago, Mississippi's governor declared April “Confederate Heritage Month.” Fortunately, opposing voices from the realm of ...
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Cold Mountain: The Civil War’s Night at the Opera

Cold Mountain: The Civil War’s Night at the Opera

“War chisels your soul with fear and bitterness into something dark and strange. Hard to find your way back in so much darkness, from so much pain” – Inman (Act II, Scene X) On Friday night, February 5, 2016, Cold Mountain made its Philadelphia debut at the Academy of Music ...
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Hateful Eight 3

Hateful and Forgetful: Tarantino’s Latest Chooses Gore over Racial Commentary

Is Minnie's Haberdashery, the one room stagecoach stop in which all but a few scenes of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight take place, the director's version of hell? If so, hell is a cold place of contradictions, unexpected alliances, violence, vulgarity, and truly bad coffee. Stuck in Wyoming blizzard with ...
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