“Film strongly influences perceptions of historical events.” Gary W. Gallagher: History Professor, University of Virginia
If there is a film genre that has been the source of more fiction and mythology than the western, that category would have to be the American Civil War. The difference seems to be that while some of the most persistent myths about the frontier West like the quick draw shoot-out are Hollywood fabrications that keep getting put into new movies, many of the contemporary beliefs about the Civil War are perpetuated because contrary facts get omitted from scripts. So whereas the reputation of Tombstone’s Johnny Ringo as a gunfighter is maintained on the screen even though he was never in a gunfight (nor was he killed by Doc Holliday as the movies have it) according to those who knew him like my grandfather and great uncle, a US Deputy Marshal and business partner of Wyatt Earp’s, we never see that Union general Ulysses S. Grant, the man supposedly fighting a war to end slavery, used his wife’s slave during that entire war or that Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the man supposedly fighting to protect slavery, considered it an evil and didn’t own any slaves. That’s just one of the numerous contradictions of this conflict that we have not seen on the screen that have created so many false perceptions of it.
Via laurencealmand, Belle Grove
========
No comments:
Post a Comment