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"Historians love to complain about how popular movies distort the past, even as we envy their power to shape perceptions and beliefs. The authors in this lively collection instead consider what those films can teach us about the past, the film makers' present, and the evolving mythologies of American exceptionalism."--Kenneth Noe, author of
The Yellowhammer War: Alabama in the Civil War and Reconstruction"In
Writing History with Lightning, Matthew Hulbert and John Inscoe assemble an all-star cast of scholars to explore a century of filmmaking about nineteenth-century America. Covering a wide range of movies and subjects, these fun, insightful essays shine the brightest when they look beyond Hollywood's historical inaccuracies and explain what filmmaking and history have in common--tension, interpretation, narrative, context, and resonance. I give it two thumbs up!"--Jason Phillips, author of
Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future
About the author
Matthew Christopher Hulbert is a historian of American violence and memory, with a specific interest in the Civil War era. He is the author of
The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West, winner of the 2017 Wiley-Silver Prize.
John C. Inscoe is Albert B. Saye Professor of History and University Professor at the University of Georgia. His books include
Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography; Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South; and
Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.
Summary
Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation's past.
