Thanks to my editor, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, for cobbling together an appropriate movie review from my last few posts for my column at the Atlantic. She saved me a couple of hours of work that I don’t have this week. For this historian and history educator, the amount of coverage that this movie has received [...]
Abraham Lincoln
Historians are stakeholders in anything that attempts to tell a story about or represent the past. The vast majority of these stories pass us by innocently enough, but when the most popular Hollywood director makes a movie about Lincoln we watch and listen closely. We don’t just watch, we also feel a strong need to [...]
Thanks to all of you for the thoughtful comments in response to my posts about Spielberg’s Lincoln [and here] movie. I love to be able to use the blog to share my thoughts, but often your comments are much more interesting. Like some of you I blew off that opening scene in which Lincoln talks [...]
When I first heard that Spielberg was planning on making a moving about Lincoln one of the first things I imagined was an opening battle scene that approached the realism of Saving Private Ryan. I had never before scene anything like it on the big screen. Well, we got an opening battle scene, but it [...]
We go to the movies to be entertained and transported to a different time and place. That certainly happened for me while watching Steven Spielberg’s movie about Lincoln and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. That’s not such an easy thing to do when you’ve spend the better part of the last 15 years reading [...]
Hope all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving today. Enjoy the time with family and do yourself a favor and hold off on the shopping until tomorrow and please be safe if you are on the roads this weekend. Looks like the Virginia Historical Society is trying to reassert itself as hosting the first Thanksgiving. [...]
I am hoping to catch Spielberg’s Lincoln movie this weekend. My plan is to write a review, but please don’t expect a narrowly-focused critique of how well the film reflects current Lincoln/Civil War historiography. Such an approach almost always fails to capture the intention of why people make movies and why we go to see [...]
I’ve already received a few emails asking for recommendations on books about Abraham Lincoln. Since I anticipate more of these requests after tomorrow, I thought it might be a good idea to put together a short list of Lincoln books. My recommendations are for those of you who walk out of the theater in the [...]
