Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America ed. by Matthew Christopher Hulbert, John C. Inscoe (review)

The editors of this volume set out with the objective “to scrutinize the movie-born visual narratives that undergird and trigger collective memories of American history and to grapple with how (and why) understandings of them have changed over time” (p. 6). This seems to suggest that their book is not so much about movies, as its subtitle suggests, as about the memories and history that movies purport to represent.

And indeed, with a few valuable exceptions, the method of this work is less grounded in current approaches in film and media studies than in historians’ frustration with the cinema’s (or, more accurately, Hollywood cinema’s) inability to get history right. A great majority of the twenty-six concise essays here (most of them devoted to a single film) include elaborate plot summaries of films alongside lists of historical inaccuracies, anachronisms, and other liberties taken—intentionally or not—by filmmakers who seem more aligned with established film genres than with fidelity to empirical evidence and historiography.

The collection enlists a roster of eminent senior scholars who speak on topics they know extremely well: James E. Crisp on Texas, Michael Burlingame on Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Rediker on slavery, Catherine Clinton on gender roles, and so on; several emerging scholars contribute essays as well. Thus, the primary subject of the book as a whole is its critique of the yawning gulf between myth—which Hollywood seems to have been all too happy to purvey from its beginnings to the twenty-first century—and history—which most of the contributors value, implicitly or explicitly, far more highly, and which they defend vigorously in the face of Hollywood’s seductive lies and evasions. A few of these cases and their pernicious effects are already well known, such as D. W. Griffith’s foundational The Birth of a Nation (1915), a Lost Cause narrative of black bestiality and Ku Klux Klan heroism, while others, such as The Far Horizons (1955), a sentimental dramatization of the Lewis and Clark expedition, are more appropriately obscure. Along with this valiant defense of history, however, there are frequent signs of envy and exhaustion, with many contributors struggling to bear up under the weight of an entertainment industry whose vast economic power and cultural influence over the historical consciousness of countless millions of eager viewers cannot be denied. So while the distinction between Hollywood myth and historical reality may well be a vital point to make in our ongoing era of bread and circuses, it feels somewhat belabored over the course of the collection as a whole. Another way of saying this would be to call this a book by historians who seem to fear they are defending a lost cause of their own.

In a related way, one of the most frustrating aspects of the collection is its limited methodology. Hollywood feature films are the only films considered, despite the fact that an enormous archive of other motion pictures of many types, from newsreels to industrial films to home movies and beyond, might have been examined for other insights into nineteenth-century American history. Foreign films, and what they might contribute to this discussion, seem never to have existed at all. Hollywood fills this vacuum, towering monolithically over the historical imagination and skewing the archive so that contributors’ pessimism seems more appropriate than it may have been in the presence of another set of sources and methods.

Likewise, there is virtually no discussion of nineteenth-century media or popular culture of the sort that might shed light on Hollywood’s massive influence on the modern world. Blackface minstrelsy—derived in the early-nineteenth-century cities of the U.S. North—goes entirely unmentioned here, despite the fact that it provided much of the basis for modern American popular culture and shaped representations of race in Hollywood...