The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past (review)

Seventy-Nine Articles

As readers of this journal well know, whether traditionally minded academic historians like it or not, Hollywood is the world's history teacher and has been now for over a century. This comprehensive and splendidly presented reference book provides an authoritative and accessible overview of Hollywood's treatment of the history of the United States from the birth of American filmmaking to the present era. In so doing it gives a fair idea of exactly what Americans have learned and or forgotten at the hands of this most idiosyncratic of tutors.

The editor Peter C. Rollins has marshaled seventy-nine succinctly written and consistently engaging articles each written by distinguished figures in the film and history field—including Thomas Doherty, Michael Shull, Robert B. Toplin, and Rollins himself—to create an indispensable work which will be the starting point for the next generation of scholarship in the field.

The successful editing of a reference work requires two things: the dexterous management of contributors and an intellectually coherent structure. The appearance of the volume is testament to the former, but the latter is also happily evident as soon as one seeks to use this work in "hot pursuit" of a research theme.

The book is structured around eight categories: eras (from the puritans to the 1980s); wars and other major events (including treatment of the Mexican and Spanish American Wars and separate treatment of World War Two documentaries and feature films); notable people (mostly presidents); groups (covering a full range of American ethnic groups—comparison reveals that Arab Americans have faired worst of all); institutions and movements (including baseball, congress, labor movements, and both public and private schools); places (from New York City to "the sea" and outer space); themes and topics (a catch-all category including drugs, crime, feminism, railroads, and sexuality); and finally a fascinating category entitled "myths and heroes," which comprises "the American Adam," the American fighting man, democracy and equality, the frontier and the west, Hollywood's detective, the machine in the garden—being the intrusion of mechanized modernity into the American frontier idyll—and a final entry called "success and the self-made man" dealing with myths of American business.

The book runs close to seven hundred pages, but even so there are a few omissions. Given the geography of U.S. movie production it is surprising that the "places" section does not include a dedicated entry for California, though the likely raw material surfaces under entries like "Mexican Americans" (for The Mask of Zorro, etc.) and "cities and corruption" for LA (Chinatown), and scattered references to San Francisco. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are not addressed as a group per se, and race/ethnicity is glossed over in the treatment of "Power Elites" in the "groups" section.

But such are small matters. This is a terrific volume that deserves a place on every film and history scholar's shelf. One hopes that Columbia might now consider a paperback addition for the student market.