Hollywood’s History
History Through…
…Film
During the past century, a growing amount of what Americans know about history has come from the movies. Popular films both represent and misrepresent the historical past. On the one hand, the movies expose the public to the look and feel of a particular era. Film helps audiences visualize the past in a way no written text can, and introduces viewers to key historical episodes that they might never know about otherwise.
On the other hand, movies also distort the past. Historical movies typically simplify the historical record, condense timelines, collapse several personalities into a single character, invent dialogue and situations, and take liberty with facts. Much of the complexity of the past disappears, as movies populate the screen with clearly identified heroes and villains.
The following film clips present two opposing viewpoints on American history, and illustrate how interpretations of the same history can differ.
Spirit of America
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that left nearly 3,000 Americans dead, and which destroyed New York City’s World Trade Centers and severely damaged the Pentagon, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, Chuck Workman, created a 3-minute long montage that spliced clips from 110 Hollywood movies. The trailer was shown in more than 10,000 movie theaters in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
Brief History of the United States of America
In his 2002 documentary, Brief History of the United States of America from his documentary Bowling for Columbine, filmmaker Michael Moore explores the roots of the United States’ fascination with guns.
Hidden History
Zombies
They are the walking dead. They drag their feet and smell of decay. Their eyes are lifeless and they amble without purpose. They straddle the boundary between life and death.
Zombies, in American popular culture, are reanimated corpses with an unquenchable taste for human flesh, especially brains. They are human in form but lack self-awareness, intelligence, and a soul.
Zombies now pervade popular culture, from Night of the Living Dead to World War Z.
The undead have a history. They are a product of slavery and colonial dispossession. The very word has African roots, from words for corpse or ghost or spirit of the dead.
The idea of Zombies first appeared in Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which imported large numbers of African slaves to toil on sugar plantations. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within, on average, seven years, which only led to the capture and import of more.
Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, an undead slave at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.
After Haiti’s slaves overthrew their masters in 1804, the concept of zombies entered into Haiti’s folklore. Sorcerers were said to be able to bewitch individuals and force them to do heavy labor. It would be these ideas that would enter into American popular culture in the pulp fiction of the 1920s, which treated zombies as boogeyman, not unlike werewolves and vampires. The idea of zombies was further popularized by Hollywood in such movies as White Zombie (1932) or I Walked With a Zombie (1943).
Today, popular culture uses the zombie as an escapist fantasy, its historic significance long forgotten.
History Through…
…Song: “We Shall Overcome”
On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan, a folk singer and folklorist, stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song that would become the anthem of the Civil Rights movement.
Carawan did not write the song, but he arranged the song and popularized it. The melody had its roots in a religious hymn written in the 1790s. The original lyrics were by a black Methodist minister, Charles Albert Tindley, but sung to a very different tune. In 1945, the song, combining Tindley’s words with the hymn’s melody, was sung on picket lines by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C.
Carawan thought folk music could be a powerful instrument of social change. He traveled across the South and collected folk songs. One song he found was called “Keep Your Hands on the Plow.” It would become “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” another Civil Rights anthem.
The power of “We Shall Overcome” was underscored just five years after Carawan first sang it.
On March 15, 1965, in a televised address seen by 70 million Americans, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his intention to submit a voting rights bill to Congress, partly in response to efforts by authorities in Selma, Alabama to prevent African Americans from registering to vote.
Describing the legislation—which he would sign into law that August as the Voting Rights Act of 1965—President Johnson said: “Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.” He continued:“Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
President Johnson added: “And we shall overcome.”