while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts.

What matters most in Django, then, is not the accuracy of the film’s historical claims but how Tarantino’s awareness of his contemporary audience mediates his symbolic enterprise.

Lincoln slowly becomes aware […] that a titanic struggle is going on in the background between free humans and vampires.

Accuracy versus “Truth” in Television As a young kid I spent a portion of every summer with my father riding […]

A Historical Turn for the Better, or Worse? Scholars of early America have a complicated relationship with historical movies and […]

The difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama.

The abstract goal of thinking about history is made wonderfully concrete by the documentary’s organizing structure.

In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony.

Actually, his recent body of work shows a remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The reenactments that run through and, in the end, dominate the film portray the Webster-Parkman principals and events through a gothic lens that does not so much resurrect the past as relinquish it to ways of seeing and telling adopted from Hollywood movies and stylish television.”

A mere four hundred British families applied to live for three months in London’s retrofitted 1900 House, but nearly ten times as many Americans are seeking to live for twice as long in the far more physically grueling Frontier House.

“Did the family-owned San Antonio printing company really print the paper money that helped finance the Mexican Revolution, as the current owner has heard rumored? Is the salty old New Englander right when he says that the whaling ship his grandfather skippered out of New Bedford sheltered escaped slaves among its crew?”

“Why this judgment about whether or not the participants really lived the life of 1883 homesteaders? Is the experiment a success if they feel as though they were homesteading or only if they convince the experts that they’d worked hard enough to survive the winter?”

“Stanford historian Jack Rakove, who serves as consultant, confesses, ‘If you ask from a historian’s vantage point, how does this correspond to contemporary scholarship? Well, probably, not that well. But if you ask, what is it that students of this age ought to be introduced to so that they have a rough idea of the Revolution, it’s actually pretty good.”

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality.

This summer, public television stations across the U.S. aired The 1900 House, a four-part series billed on PBS’s website as […]

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